Cooking at home — from scratch — makes it possible for many of us to afford to eat local and organic foods. But the No. 1 barrier people have to cooking at home is time. And, for amateur cooks, following recipes is much more time-consuming without strong knife skills.

The more capable you are in the kitchen, the more flexibility you have when it comes to buying and eating whole, less processed (often more affordable) foods. For instance, two people can get three meals out of one whole chicken for about the same price as buying two pre-cut boneless, skinless chicken breasts. (Of course, the vegetarian equivalent may not apply exactly, but you’ll eat more veggies for your dollar if you’re comfortable cutting and cooking them at home.)

Not that everyone who cooks has knife skills. I cringe in fingernails-on-chalkboard agony when I watch home cooks — and yes, the occasional pro — try to steady a whole onion with a dull blade and their fingers fully extended. What should take about 30 seconds takes 5 minutes, and that’s without a trip to the first aid kit or the hospital. Then they move on to the chicken and I have to look away.

The single most important thing you need to improve your knife skills is a sharp edge. Nothing is more dangerous in the kitchen than a dull blade; it ruins the food and slows you down. If you have the means, there are spectacular knives to be had out there to suit virtually any taste or style. (Here’s a great guide to knives from chef and cooking instructor Samin Nosrat.) The main advantage to the expensive knives, apart from the envy of your friends, is that they hold an edge longer, require less maintenance, and last longer. But the cheap-o blades will suffice if you have a good sharpener and run them across a honing steel before each use.

Let’s talk about the difference between sharpening and honing: Sharpening repairs an edge; honing maintains it. You’ve probably seen the chefs in their stovepipe toques at the carving station during Sunday brunch, methodically rubbing their carving knives against what appears to be a steel rod on a handle. That rod is electroplated with industrial diamond dust, and it removes the spurs, wire edge, and other minor flaws on an edge to keep it sharper longer. Not nearly as expensive as it may sound, the diamond dust is the same manufactured diamond that is in the needle of a good turntable. It will last forever, and all it needs for care is an occasional wash with warm soapy water.

Eventually, however, every knife needs to be taken to a sharpening stone. There are dozens of styles of stones but they all do approximately the same thing — they remove small amounts of metal to recarve the V-shaped edge needed for effective cutting. The more effective your honing (and the better the quality your blade), the less you’ll need a sharpening stone.

Grip is also important element. Grasp the handle of the knife as if you were shaking hands with it, and wrap your index finger around the hilt for better control (not extended forward along the spine). Don’t hold it too firmly, this will only lead to accidents and make you tire sooner. Your guide hand (that’s the one holding the food rather than the knife) should always have the fingers curled under, a little like a hermit crab. This way the guide hand’s knuckles act as a guide as they meet the flat side of the knife.

Cutting techniques vary widely according to the food’s shape. But it’s a good rule to always keep the largest, flattest side of the food face down on the cutting surface. This provides stability so it’s less likely to roll or slip away from you. One other great safety tip: Always place a damp rag under your cutting board. This keeps it from slipping around and causing accidents.

Of course, like any other useful skill, proper knife handling requires practice. The nice thing is that it’s practice that yields delicious results. All the details behind good knife skills could fill a book, and, in fact, they have. I highly recommend The Complete Book of Knife Skills by my friend Jeffrey Elliot with James P. DeWan. It’s full of step-by-step techniques and extremely accurate photography, as well as information about the proper care and handling, and the history of knives.

So get into your kitchen and start practicing. You’ll save money and time and start eating better. And you’ll learn to respect, rather than fear, the blade.

Filed under: Food]]>http://grist.org/food/the-facts-of-knife/feed/0cutting-mushrooms-chef-cookingcutting-mushrooms-chef-cookingChef’s diary: Holiday traditionshttp://grist.org/food/2011-12-22-chefs-diary-holiday-traditions/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/food/2011-12-22-chefs-diary-holiday-traditions/#commentsThu, 22 Dec 2011 19:00:44 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-12-22-chefs-diary-holiday-traditions/]]>For some folks, this season is about peace and good tidings. For others, it’s just about the presents. In my family, the holidays were, and still are, all about the food.

There are many items that must be on the table at my house, or it simply isn’t Christmas. Among these are the wild rice dressing, cornbread, grandma’s cranberries, and mom’s bourbon pound cake. Now that pound cake is a very closely guarded family recipe, but the other recipes are below.

Wild rice

Photo: WhitneyI would have never thought wild rice dressing could be improved upon until I discovered the magnificent flavors of real Manoomin, a traditional Native American “rice” that is hand-harvested and hand-parched in the Great Lakes region of Minnesota. If don’t you live in Minnesota, the real Manoomin can be ordered online from the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a group that works to restore native foods and traditions. It’s a bit more expensive than the industrialized “paddy rice” coming out of California, but it is worth every penny. The flavor is far richer, far more intense, and the nutritional value is far higher. Add to this the spiritual benefit of knowing you’re helping a community in need become more self-sufficient, and it becomes downright rewarding.

Kurt’s Mom’s Wild Rice Dressing

It’s easy enough to make this dish vegetarian (or vegan, in fact). Simply leave out the sausage, increase the mushrooms, substitute vegetable broth for the chicken stock and olive oil for the butter.

Brown pork in butter until fully cooked. Add remaining ingredients. Simmer for 10 minutes, then mix in rice and remaining broth. Bake covered at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, then uncovered to desired consistency (I like it to get crunchy on top).

Serve immediately or store (it freezes well). Makes about 8 servings.

Filed under: Food]]>http://grist.org/food/2011-12-22-chefs-diary-holiday-traditions/feed/0cranberries-flickr-catharticflux.jpgWild rice.Now we’re cooking: How to get Americans back in the kitchenhttp://grist.org/food/2011-12-20-now-were-cooking-how-to-get-americans-back-in-the-kitchen/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/food/2011-12-20-now-were-cooking-how-to-get-americans-back-in-the-kitchen/#commentsTue, 20 Dec 2011 20:00:31 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-12-20-now-were-cooking-how-to-get-americans-back-in-the-kitchen/]]>Photo from the video Tamar Adler Talks About An Everlasting Meal.Editor’s note: It’s unanimous these days: Cooking food from scratch at home is one of the best ways to eat sustainably without breaking the bank. It also enables eaters to easily support food producers who use environmentally sound, ethical, and humane practices. But most Americans can’t pull this off regularly. We recently invited Kurt Michael Friese and Tamar Adler — two people who have strong feelings about the importance of home cooking — to have a conversation for Grist. Adler is a chef, cooking teacher, and the author of the new book An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace; Friese is a chef, the editor of Edible Iowa River Valley, and the author of two books, including A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartlandand Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots on the Chile Trail (which he co-authored with Gary Nabhan and Kraig Kraft).

Kurt Michael Friese: I think Americans have been sold a bill of goods: I think they’ve been coerced into believing that cooking is a chore akin to washing windows, something to be avoided if possible and then done as quickly and grudgingly as they can manage. Too many people believe they don’t have the time. That’s the most common excuse anyway. And of course they do — it’s all a matter of priorities.

Tamar Adler: My sense is that there are three variables. A study that came out earlier this year found that 28 percent of Americans stayed out of their kitchens because they were scared they didn’t know how to cook. The other two variables are obviously time and money. The same study found that one-third of Americans spent more time thinking about what to cook than actually cooking. In other words, we have a very skewed relationship to the act of cooking.

The thing about priorities is that if we don’t know what cooking actually means — that is, the kind of cooking that makes deep sense in our lives — then of course we don’t have time, or money.

It takes a very long time to cook in a way that isn’t sustainable, and it’s very expensive. And it makes sense to feel bullied by being told to make something that takes a long time and costs a lot of money a priority. But of course, that’s not what we’re saying. It just takes a lot of explaining and careful guidance to show the whole picture of cooking, and how much it can give you, if you do it with a certain mindset.

Kurt: I have long said that I may be a part of the last generation to have learned to cook at his mother and grandmother’s apron strings. And if people are no longer learning to cook from their parents (because their parents didn’t learn either), then we need to find some new ways to teach them. One thing I’ve called for is something I call The Public Hearth.

Tamar: That sounds wonderful.

Kurt: What did you want to achieve with your book? The first thing that pops into my head when I’m asked about why I write about food is MFK Fisher’s response to the same question: “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk, and that is what I say when people ask me, ‘Why do you write of food, and not of love or war?'”

Tamar: I have two answers. One is also MFK Fisher’s, which I’ll paraphrase: People who live to eat are not so much bad as boring, and in fact she says she knew only two such sorry souls. I know a few, and it’s true I don’t mind them so much as pity them. But she knew a good many people, as do I, who would be better for considering their appetites seriously, and not obsessively, but as we allow ourselves to consider our sleep, and caring for our children, and enjoying sunny days. Because our appetites our unique to us, and considering them makes us more responsible and happier, healthier beings.

The second answer is mine, and it is that the means of producing our food has been meanly wrested from our hands, and we need it back. It sounds like a great communist exercise when I put it like that, but it’s fundamental to our sovereignty to have the means to feed ourselves.

Kurt: Very true. And what I spend a lot of time pointing out to people is that cooking is the simplest, purest, most tangible way we can convey our love for our family and friends. What we feed our children is both metaphorically and literally what they become. That’s what I mean by priorities.

So I try to teach people the real basics of cooking. How to make a stock, the difference between braising and roasting, how to break down a chicken, etc. General knife skills, too — nothing is a greater time-saver for the home cook than strong knife skills.

Tamar: I want to get away from admonishing people that their priorities are wrong. The great, lucky thing is that when you know how to throw your scraps into a pot to make stock — then how when you have stock, all you have to do is poach an egg in it and toast some stale bread — feeding people well is freeing.

I wrote my book to be on the side of everyone who’s scared, and everyone who wants to prioritize cooking, but can’t see how to — for whom it’s a priority they feel they have to trade off because they’re not skilled enough.

They have [so few] advocates now. You are one, and Samin Nosrat is one, and I’m trying to be one. Michael Pollan in his next book is going to be one, and we have to keep it up.

Kurt: And it’s the same entities scaring them from cooking as feeding them the stuff that confuses what’s healthful and not.

Tamar: Yes. I had a few great conversations with trendologists when I was writing my New York Times op-ed on the value of a grandmotherly perspective on cooking — like the one we have on Thanksgiving — and both said that food companies were trying to get people not to cook.

And because [companies like] Kraft or Velveeta, with their Cheesy Skillets, and organic premade burritos, etc., cater to a lot of the trends — i.e. people wanting to feed their families organic food, and artisanal food — what those really things mean, and how easy and affordable it can be to engage them, gets obscured.

Kurt: You would not believe the number of calls we receive at my restaurant every year asking if we are open on Thanksgiving. I suppose I should be honored that they’d want me to cook this important meal for them, but it makes me sad that they can’t or won’t do it themselves.

Tamar: Maybe we should touch on the idea of the professionalization of cooking. We think we’re supposed to be chefs. We idolize chefs, we think we’re supposed to be able to cook like them. We go to restaurants and imagine that what we get is cooking. And that the alternative is premade.

Kurt: There has been a move over the last two decades to make chefs into rock stars, and while I wanted to be a rock star when I was 15, I no longer do. I like that the attention is beginning to shift toward the farmer, who after all is doing most of the hard work. We chefs too often are, in Tony Bourdain’s parlance, “People who swan around in white coats and take credit for other people’s toil.”

The most obvious thing people could learn from the pros, though, is mise en place.

Tamar: I am, again here, a little contrarian. Chefs are amazing, but a lot of what they do is organizational, and about the incredible difficulties in staying inspired while running a volatile organization — dealing with a million moving pieces and people with different needs, and equipment that breaks down.

Home cooks need to learn from skilled, grounded home cooks. They can learn mise en place, but they get that from the Food Network. What they don’t get from the Food Network, or from the lionizing of the restaurant or from many food magazines is [suggestions like] save onion skins, or make frittatas from anything. I think that’s what grandmothers used to teach.

Kurt: As my mother told me back in the ’80s, “quiche was not developed as a test of masculinity, it was developed to get rid of leftovers.” I worry about what people learn from TV because it’s too much like porn: People who are prettier and more talented than you doing things you’ll never do in places you’ll never do them. It stresses people out to think that they need to live up to that standard.

Tamar: Exactly. Two days ago I did a shoot for Martha Stewart Everyday Food, and the editor-in-chief stopped the art director from putting things in little perfect bowls because she didn’t want to make it aspirational. She wanted it to be approachable for home cooks, which made me really happy.

This brings us to the difference between having an intimate knowledge of food versus fetishizing it.

Kurt: Yes. Is there a more fetishized food than bacon?

Tamar: Bacon is a great example. Bacon is a sort of magic food, a little like olives, or anchovies, in that if you have a little, anything else you have seems special. If you have a tiny bit of bacon around, simple pasta with butter and cheese becomes a wonderful version of carbonara. Or an egg, fried in [bacon] fat, seems rustic and hardy. If you have olives, you can make olive paste, which disguises the fact that other than that you only have toast. A couple of anchovies transform anything, from pasta, to salad, to stale bread. But I didn’t feel able, in my book, to say that bacon was magical for all those reasons, because instead of understanding bacon as deeply economical, and all it takes to transform a staple into a great, rustic meal, we [now] understand it as something that needs to go into bourbon and chocolate. Even into peanut butter! We manage to pervert the most useful things, and in so doing, lose the ability to really marshal them.

Kurt: The same thing happened to skirt steak.

Tamar: We need to rebind cooking to the sort of simple love we have for our pets and children, unbind it from passion and rebind it to tenderness.

Kurt: That’s an excellent point. But I also believe traceability is vital — knowing the source of your food and shaking the hand that raised it when possible. Also understanding the importance of biodiversity — becoming aware that there is more than one kind of squash, or apple, or pig, and that we need there to be more than one kind. It also helps to learn about food from as many different cultures as possible. Eating their food with them is far better than “walking a mile in their shoes” to get to know that culture.

Tamar: And part of it being important to you is knowing that it can be important without being everything. It can matter, but not matter to the exclusion of all else. In order for that to be true, we need to know how to cook, and the kinds of cooking that are not time-intensive and denatured — like the stuff on Top Chef or Iron Chef — but the quiche which uses leftovers.

Kurt: Where do you think class comes into it?

How do we get the single mom in a trailer with four kids to read [your] book? Or at least to understand its ideas?

Tamar: That’s what I wanted my book to do. We need to keep our message focused on cooking, and on the sort of cooking that’s economical. We need skills classes to be affordable. [I want] to get a grant to get my book handed out at community centers, and get FoodCorps to teach how to make pasta with eggs, and make good soup from a can of chickpeas. We need to make cooking into the second part of food justice, and food sovereignty, and talk about feedings ourselves as something we deserve to be able to do.

Kurt: Indeed. It’s even patriotic!

Tamar: Yes, it is patriotic. I really wanted Sam Kass and Michelle Obama to read the book, because I want to get the message to people who need it.

Folks across the country know something is wrong. There’s just something about the system we’ve created over several decades that is inherently flawed. Some blame the government, others big banks, still others blame political parties, but all agree that there’s something that’s just not quite working the way it should. People are losing homes, jobs, and health coverage at an alarming rate because of the societal turbulence in the enormous yet formless thing we call the economy.

Enter Change.org and their 10 Ideas for Change in America. Taking advantage of the concept of “the wisdom of crowds,” Change.org launched a campaign to find 10 great ideas. It began with thousands that were submitted by ordinary individuals and organized interest groups alike. These were whittled down through online voting to a more manageable 70 or so, and right now the voting is getting down to the wire to choose which 10 ideas will be presented to the White House – as in formally presented to senior people there, not just sent in an envelope to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You can (and should!) vote too.

All, or nearly all at least, are worthy ideas. Each has its merit and is worthy of consideration. But for those with an interest in food, three of them rise to the top quickly, and first among equals is Slow Money.

The idea is a simple one: invest as if food, farms and fertility actually mattered. Get anyone who invests money (and if you have a 401k or an IRA, that’s you too) to direct just 1% of it toward small food enterprises and local food systems. Get at least that small sum of money out of the hands of Wall Street, huge banks and multinationals and use it, quite literally, as seed money. Invest in local farms, food systems, artisans, brewers, bakers, cheesemakers and so on and keep that money close to home.

We’d create a thriving economy that makes real, healthy food, instead of a fake one that just makes money for bankers. One that invests in people and the land, not in some distant amorphous concept called Wall Street.

In their book Inside the Apple, a Streetwise History of New York City, this is how Michelle and James Nevius describe the building of the palisade for which Wall Street was named: “The wall had two major problems: it wasn’t needed and it didn’t work.”

Also interested in investing in the land is the American Farmland Trust, whose idea for saving farm and ranchland is doing quite well in the balloting, as well as an initiative to put a garden in every school. Both are important concepts you’ve heard me advocate for vociferously for years.

Slow Money is new and novel though, and needs more voted before this thing wraps up at 5pm EST this Friday, 3/12. Please visit Change.org, vote for these 3 ideas and any other 7 you feel are worthy. It’s fun, important, and it only takes a couple minutes. Thank you.

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system; on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, not their strategy.

That’s how it’s gone with the British 2009 documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several 10-minute segments via YouTube (Part One) because it hasn’t been released in the U.S., primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the director (Tracy Worcester, who spent four years making the film) by the film’s main villain, Smithfield Foods. The world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million pigs per year in 15 countries, accruing annual sales around $12 billion. The UK’s Channel 4 ran the film last summer despite four letters from Smithfield threatening litigation, but since no U.S. insurer would back the film’s release here, it has become essentially a black-market film. Score another one for corporate censorship.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly doesn’t show their company in the most favorable light. Right off the bat, the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities. We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots. An owner of a small family farm in Poland who this large corporation has pushed out of business says, “I don’t know whether I should retire, hang myself, or leave the country.”

Watch the trailer:

In the early ’90s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers in Poland. Today there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by Smithfield Foods. Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms with two to three minimum-wage jobs. Smithfield accountants and shareholders might laud the boost to the company’s bottom line, but one protester in the film asks a different question:

Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it is called “tyranny,” but when the oppressor is a multinational corporation, it is called “efficiency?”

It was precisely this form of “efficiency” that the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when he said “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”

Smithfield is not the only corporate specimen under Worcester’s microscope; she takes large financial institutions to task as well. In an interview with noted Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in absolutely everything—making one-third of all political contributions in the United States (a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision). Big Money’s influence, along with that of many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope of laws throughout the U.S. and the world. My daddy used to call this the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

That influence is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair. As Pig Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the damages they cause, to the environment and to human health, then any small farmer in the world could out-compete them. But they don’t, because the game is rigged.

So most of the time, agribusiness will take its profits and steam obliviously onward. But if anyone points out that the wreckage these companies leave in their wakes, they have scads of lawyers and PR professionals to make certain no one hears. Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand.

Filed under: Food]]>http://grist.org/article/pig-business-or-business-pigs/feed/0pigbiz.jpgMovie poster for Pig BusinessStill another critic of real food – this time in the NYThttp://grist.org/article/still-another-critic-of-real-food-this-time-in-the-nyt/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/still-another-critic-of-real-food-this-time-in-the-nyt/#commentsWed, 17 Feb 2010 06:32:48 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=35280]]>In Sunday’s New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd.

It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan’s name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.

I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin’s piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this:

Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. But as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s viability.

What struck me first about this statement was that it came the same week that talking heads in the media and politics (And even Donald Trump?) were blindly arguing that all this snow was proof that climate change was a hoax (perpetrated to what end? I’ve always wondered). The irony is that these bigger storms are likely a symptom of that same climate change, caused in no small measure by industrial agriculture.

Then I noticed the condescension. These so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement. Mr. Darlin, we are part of a national movement, an international movement in fact, led by dozens of very worthy organizations working hard to create a food system that is good, clean, and fair. Our current system is none of these things. I happen to sit on the board of directors of one such organization, Slow Food USA, which has 26,000 members nationwide and over 100,000 members worldwide. Pretty sure that alone qualifies as a movement, but as I said we are not alone.

What Mr. Darlin seems not to understand though is that there is so much more to this movement. We are not a bunch of yuppie foodies stuffing our craws with foie gras, as he and others might have their readers believe. The system we envision, as I said, is one that is:

1. Good – meaning that the food tastes good and is nutritious 2. Clean – meaning that producing the food has only beneficial and not negative effects on the environment in which it is produced, and that there is nothing in the food that isn’t food (and if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it is not food now) 3. Fair – meaning that the people who produce the food should be justly compensated for their work.

This is not an effort to create some Utopian state, nor is it a recreation of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” (another accusation Darlin hurls). It is a wholehearted effort to improve the lives of everyone who eats. We do not say: good food for us, we say good food for all! And when Darlin states, “People who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, wholesome hobby — but one that can make little sense economically,” he needs to do a bit more research than reading William Alexander’s “The $64 Tomato.”

In fact, during World Wars I, II and the Great Depression, for example, more than half of America’s produce came from privately held or community-based “Victory Gardens.” But Americans have been sold a bill of goods, by Big Ag and other industrial interests, that has us all thinking that cooking, much less growing our own food, is a chore akin to washing windows, one to be avoided whenever possible and then done grudgingly only when absolutely necessary. In fact, cooking is far more important. It is an almost spiritual act to provide nourishment to our loved ones, yet as a society we have come to mistake frenzy for efficiency, which has led to believing we are satisfied with expedient mediocrity, and in the balance as always it’s the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, with respect to making “little sense economically,” I’ve often pointed out that where I live in Johnson County, Iowa, there are about 50,000 households. If each of them redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward getting something locally — from a farmers market, a CSA, a local brewery, or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26 million in our economy every year. Now imagine same statistic in a major metro like Mr. Darlin’s native San Francisco.

We are not idiots and none of us expects to see the brick-by-brick dismantling of McDonald’s worldwide (well OK, some may wish it, but that’s different). But there is a massive amount of room for improvement and we want to see it. No health care system, no matter how it is reformed, can deal with the $157 billion we spend annually in the US alone on obesity-related illness. We live in a world with a billion people starving and another billion overweight and yet undernourished. Children born in the US have a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes before they are old enough to vote, and among minorities that ratio rises to one-in-two.

Clearly the industrial model, which may work just fine for Darlin’s primary field of computers, is not working for food. There must be a better way and we are out to find it. Trying to stick us with an elitist tag when we are trying to help farmers and raise healthy children simply won’t wash.

Filed under: Food]]>http://grist.org/article/still-another-critic-of-real-food-this-time-in-the-nyt/feed/0Failure to cultivate: Why school gardens ARE importanthttp://grist.org/article/cultivating-failure-why-school-gardens-are-important/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/cultivating-failure-why-school-gardens-are-important/#commentsThu, 14 Jan 2010 02:04:59 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/cultivating-failure-why-school-gardens-are-important/]]>In the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, Caitlin Flanagan has written a surprisingly harsh critique of the popular and growing movement to include gardens in our public schools. In a nutshell, she states that pursuing this activity over and above the three R’s will turn our children into illiterate sharecroppers. Right from the start, though, she gets it wrong.

She has the reader picture the son of undocumented migrant workers entering his first day at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, home of the well-known Edible Schoolyard project, “where he stoops under the hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.” Her callous disrespect for labor only begins there, but the real problem with her argument lies in her stubborn refusal to accept that a good idea may have sprouted from an ideology other than her own. She goes so far as to describe it as:

…A vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).

Flanagan has chosen to ignore the core purposes of these gardens, only one of which happens to be cultivating a respect for hard work, and only one other of which is a healthy respect for real food. While she notes that the work of the garden has migrated into each of the classrooms, she ignores the obvious point that this demonstrates: There is nothing taught in schools that cannot be learned in a garden. Math and science to be sure, but also history, civics, logic, art, literature, music, and the birds and the bees both literally and figuratively. Beyond that though, in a garden a student learns responsibility, teamwork, citizenship, sustainability, and respect for nature, for others, and for themselves.

The disdain for the left-of-center viewpoints of those who started the Edible Schoolyard is evidenced in her description of Chez Panisse, the restaurant of Edible Schoolyard’s founder Alice Waters, as “an eatery where the right-on, ‘yes we can,’ ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams — wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included.” Flanagan’s attempt at snob-bashing populism and appeal toward the sensitivities of those on the right is misplaced, however, because these school garden ideas, while begun in this particular case by those with left-leaning tendencies, actually hold appeal across the political spectrum. They not only encompass a love of nature and the kind of touchy-feely sensitivities that give conservatives the willies, but also the bedrock principles of tradition and ownership and self-reliance that would be equally at home at a hippie commune or a tea party rally.

While it is rightly noted that the grades at the school quickly improved, the contention that “a recipe is much easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible” is not only insulting to professional chefs and food writers (like, well, me), but also is patently false. There is a world of difference between writing a recipe and writing one well, as anyone who as ever come across the words “but first” in a recipe will attest. The more important point though is the one that Flanagan glosses over: that the passion for learning developed in a garden, driven home by the lightening-bolt of awareness when a kid bites into a vine-ripened tomato she grew herself, is worth essays on ten plays even if Arthur Miller or Shakespeare wrote them all.

Where the argument really goes off the rails though is when Ms Flanagan posits:

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it? What is the goal of an education, of what we once called “book learning”? These are questions best left unasked when it comes to the gardens.

Not “enjoy,” Ms, Flanagan, respect. This, as I mentioned, is where her disdain for manual labor, something that everyone on the planet (beneath the upper 2 percent or so of income earners) contends with every day, becomes instructive. It is predicated on the idea that labor is something to be freed from, ostensibly through strict adherence to “book learning.” Worse, it perpetuates the misguided dogma of the last several decades that distances us from our food and insists that cooking is a chore, like washing laundry or windows, which should be avoided at all costs as if it were beneath us. This in turn not only makes her seem elitist herself, but also leaves Flanagan’s ideas of education as merely a means to create consumers, rather than citizens.

What follows in the essay is a misuse of statistics that boggles the mind, where she blames a decline in math and English among Latinos at MLK on the gardens. In legal-ese (and Latin) this is referred to as a Post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, “It follows therefore was caused by.” Another example of this would be that since all addicts were once babies, then mother’s milk leads to heroin addiction.

This is followed up by an argument that the rampant increase in childhood obesity and early-onset diabetes is not caused by a lack of access to healthy food nor the prevalence of sugary, fat laden food in schools. Rather she cites, ironically, George Orwell, to argue that it’s because poor people prefer that food. Please. And for the record, her research into two grocery stores in Compton as proof that poverty and food deserts do not go hand-in-hand is blindingly shortsighted.

There are more errors of reason, but let me cut to the chase. Flanagan sums up by saying this:

(W)e become complicit — through our best intentions — in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its fate. The state, which failed these students as children and adolescents, will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for it will have created not a generation of gentleman farmers but one of intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or political whim of their educated peers.

The belief that we will create better citizens by teaching to the test (an idea she advocates for repeatedly and vociferously) is one that will lead to a generation of closed-minded automatons incapable of learning, thinking, or fending for themselves. We are far better off with a generation of citizens who understand that sustenance comes not from factories or laboratories but from the soil and from hard working hands, both of which deserve the respect garnered from experience. We need citizens who are healthier than the generation before them; throughout most of human history the rich were fat and the poor were skinny, yet today in America it is quite the opposite. Fixing that requires direct experience and interaction with our food, something no schoolroom lecture can provide.

This is not advocacy for some weird Maoist Great Leap Forward where everyone must leave the cities and go farm. It is knowledge of one of the truest clichés known: You are what you eat. And as one of Flanagan’s carefully-book-taught computer programmers would point out, Garbage In — Garbage Out.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/cultivating-failure-why-school-gardens-are-important/feed/0Nationwide “eat-ins” show way to a revived National School Lunch Programhttp://grist.org/article/2009-09-10-eat-in-school-lunch/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-09-10-eat-in-school-lunch/#commentsFri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:28 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-10-eat-in-school-lunch/]]>Chowing down for better school lunches in Iowa City.Photo: Kurt Michael FrieseAll across the country this past Labor Day, folks gathered for picnics. That’s no surprise, of course. After all, it was a holiday, and the weather was grand across nearly the whole continent. But there was something unique about one group of picnics; 307 of them to be exact, in all 50 states. They were dubbed “Eat-Ins” (modeled on the sit-ins of the ’60s), and they were a call to action by Slow Food USA

At those picnics, including one right here in Iowa City, more than 20,000 people gathered around tables in parks and farms and school grounds to tell Congress to fix the School Lunch Program. Most of the discussions at these events and in the press afterwards centered on improving the food itself through increased Federal spending and local food initiatives. But there was another topic directly relevant to Labor Day: the call to create green jobs with a “School Lunch Corps.”

As the platform promoted by Slow Food states:

We can’t serve real food in schools without investing in school kitchens and the people who prepare and serve lunch. This spring, President Obama signed the Serve America Act, which expanded Americorps and reinforced his call for Americans to serve their country. Right now, our nation has an opportunity to train young and unemployed Americans to be the teachers, farmers, cooks and administrators we need to ensure the National School Lunch Program is protecting children’s health. President Obama has called for an end to childhood hunger by 2015; let’s answer that call by putting Americans to work building and working in school kitchens nationwide.

It bears emphasizing that the School Lunch Corps idea is not an attempt to vilify today’s lunch ladies–or squeeze them out of a job. No one at Slow Food is devaluing the hard work of the thousands of people who work in school kitchens, commissaries, and cafeterias. These folks are dedicated laborers, many of them Union members, whose hands are tied by sometimes outlandishly picayune regulations.

For example, to be permitted to serve a simple but healthy dish of red beans and rice in a school cafeteria–according to Iowa City Schools food service director Diane Duncan-Goldsmith–kitchen workers must add meat or cheese. Doesn’t matter that the dish is already a complete protein. Regulations, serving no one but dairy and beef interests, insist that main dishes must contain meat or cheese. This raises the cost and the calorie count, but adds little to the nutritional value of the meal.

Most of the food served in school cafeterias comes packaged in paper or plastic or cans, and is shipped in from an average of 1500 miles. Multiply that by the 30 million meals served in schools everyday and the impact on greenhouse gasses and the waste stream become readily apparent.

All this doesn’t even touch on the potential health effects of the food our children are eating. The keynote address at our Eat-In was delivered by Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), who sits on the House Education and Labor Committee, the panel with jurisdiction over the Child Nutrition Act reauthorization. Mr. Loebsack emphasized the connection between healthy kids and the future of our entire health care system, noting that one in three kids born after 2000 will contract diabetes before they’re old enough to vote; among minorities that number rises to one in two.

Thus a diet that puts more emphasis on whole grains and fresh vegetables, with meat as a side dish or condiment rather than the center of the plate is, as ever, the only healthy, viable alternative. As an example, the dish I brought to our Eat-In was a slight twist on classic tabouleh, with everything but the grain coming from my restaurant’s garden (I haven’t tried to grow quinoa yet).

UPDATE: The owner of the hatchery in the video mentioned below has spoken out, says there were violations of procedure but makes no apologies. He calls “instantaneous Euthanasia” “Standard industry practice.” Read the story here.

Iowa is the number-one producer of eggs in the country, with more than twice the number of laying hens than Ohio, the number two state. There are nearly 20 times as many hens here than there are people, producing a shade over 14 billion eggs a year. As one might expect, their living conditions are less than ideal.

A cursory glance at the website of the Iowa Egg Council does not reveal any of the images of the way the laying hens are treated, but rather concerns itself with recipes, coloring books for the kids, and “Eggbert’s” somewhat rosy history of egg production in Iowa. A search of their site for the term “battery cage” yields a goose egg. But battery cages are one of the major reasons why Iowa out-produces everyone else – we have lots of them.

Across the US there are about 280 million hens in battery cages at any given time, cages that so severely restrict their movements that they cannot even spread their wings. They can’t nest, bathe in the dust, perch or forage, all instinctive chicken behaviors. Completely depleted of calcium in a few short weeks, their bones break and they are shipped off, dead and dying, to soup plants and pet food factories.

Then of course there’s the small issue of the effluent these factories produce, which must be stored lest it leak into the environment, which inevitably it does. The fumes threaten the health not only of the workers at these facilities but of the neighbors on the surrounding farms too.

While it’s true that none of this is news, it is interesting to note the ways people have opted out of participating in this heinous activity, and the ways that Big Egg has attempted to mask their misdeeds.

Here in Iowa City two years ago the student body of the University of Iowa voted to ban those eggs, insisting that only “cage-free” eggs be served to the 31,000 students and 15,000 staff members who live, work and learn in the Old Capitol. Sadly though, taking them out of the cages does not usually lead to bucolic lives on Old MacDonald’s farm.

Cage-free eggs come from chickens raised in warehouses in their thousands, beaks mutilated to prevent them from pecking each other to death due to stress, and exposed to ammonia and hydrogen sulfide gasses. Of course these are all hens. The male chicks were ground up alive soon after hatching and made into feed or fertilizer. They don’t lay eggs and are therefore of no use to the industry.

Yet all of this is only part of the reason why I don’t use such eggs in my restaurant. Our eggs come from Steve Rogers of Highland Vista farms, who runs his operation based on the model of sustainable-farm folk hero Joel Salatin. His chickens live on pasture, with the freedom to come and go from the coop as they please. They’re locked up at night to protect them from predators, and the rest of the time they scratch and forage on a different patch of pasture as they are moved about the farm. They live very happy, natural chicken lives and you can taste it in the eggs.

They cost us about three times what the factory eggs cost, or about $54.00 for a case of 15 dozen, which breaks down to about 30 cents an egg. Pricey? Perhaps, but it means 60 cents worth of the plate cost of the huevos rancheros we serve at brunch every Sunday, and when it comes to freshness and flavor (not to mention nutritional quality) there is simply no comparison.

We occasionally serve a very simple egg-based dessert over seasonal fresh fruits called Zabaglione (the French call it Sabayon). It always wins raves for it’s rich decadence. But each time a customer asks if we add turmeric or saffron to make it so yellow, I smile and say “no, that’s what eggs are supposed to look like.”

Place a stainless steel bowl over a simmering saucepan of water to create a double boiler. In the bowl, whisk the eggs briskly and constantly with the sugar. While continuing to whisk, drizzle in the Marsala wine. Continue to whisk until the mixture becomes light and fluffy, a lttle like whipped cream at soft peaks.

Serve immediately over your favorite fresh fruits. Serves 4-6

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-10-updated-the-cruelty-of-industrial-egg-riculture-plus-a-tasty/feed/0friese_egg.jpgegg_friesezabLet’s (re)do school lunchhttp://grist.org/article/2009-08-17-redo-school-lunch/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-08-17-redo-school-lunch/#commentsMon, 17 Aug 2009 19:00:38 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-08-17-redo-school-lunch/]]>Are corndogs a vegetable? There has been a cultural revolution in this country over the last 50 to 75 years, a sort of intellectual cleansing that has removed from most people’s minds any understanding of food, of cooking, of the pleasures of the kitchen and table, and replaced it with the language of the drive-thru, the shopping mall, and the convenience store. Michael Pollan recently addressed this problem well.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our schools, where our kids are not taught about food and cooking, not even the “Home Economics” of my high school years. No, instead the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) teaches something called “Family and Consumer Science.” There you have it — we are not raising citizens, we are raising consumers. Our children are being taught one way of surviving in this modern, fast-paced world: the way of conspicuous consumption.

A recent federal mandate required that every school district write and implement a “Wellness Policy” that addressed, among other things, the epidemic of obesity and childhood diabetes now rampant in our youth. This was a noble endeavor; however, it needed to be more than a mere academic and bureaucratic exercise. What is called for here is a true revolution, one that, like all revolutions, will be very difficult to conduct in the face of the stalwart forces of the status quo. The fear of change is a very difficult one to overcome.

Like all of us, our children are what they eat, and they cannot be expected to learn and grow effectively on fat, salt, and corn-sweetener-laden government-subsidized surplus. What is offered to them today is the result of the entrenched bureaucracy at the USDA, the immoveable object of parental indifference, and the irresistible force of union and administrative fear of change. Unlike the rest of the student’s school day, the lunch period is conducted not by the curricular side of the school system, but by the maintenance side. Meanwhile, the hardworking members of the ICCSD Food Service staff are restrained by inefficient kitchens, ludicrous time restraints, and a budget that is laughable at best. How well would you expect to eat on $1.60 per day?

We need a paradigm shift. From the parents and the rest of the taxpayers in the district, we need an understanding that spending more money is not “just throwing money at the problem,” it is an investment in the health and well-being of our children and our community. Parents must no longer choose to ignore the situation to the proven detriment of their children. From the teachers’ unions we need the flexibility to see that there are other models for the school day and the school year that can be effective besides the one we have in place, which was created over 100 years ago to fit an agrarian calendar so that kids could be home to tend to the farm when needed. The school year in the U.S. is 180 days long. It is 240 in Germany–and 243 in Japan. School days and even school weeks are longer too. A longer school day will provide the time necessary for children to eat healthily. Today they have 30 minutes or less, and most of that is spent standing in line.

If we move lunch away from the maintenance side of the equation and over to the curriculum, food will gain the attention that is necessary for it to demonstrate its own importance. We cannot continue to teach one thing in health class and peddle another in the lunch room. Teaching about food, its history, its culture, its etiquette, and its importance to our health and community will ensure a more productive and enjoyable future for our kids. To those who say “don’t try to tell me what I can and can’t feed my kids,” I say this: First, the USDA is already doing that, and in a demonstrably unhealthy way. Second, they may be your kids, but they’re our future.

This Labor Day, Slow Food USA will formally launch its Time for Lunch campaign with “Eat-Ins” scheduled all over the country — as of this writing, 227 in 49 states (step up, Mississippi!). In partnership with Sustainable Table, The Center for Ecoliteracy, Roots of Change, Edible Communities, and other organizations, Slow Food is calling on Congress, during its reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, to put real food on our children’s lunch trays. To do so, they must double the federal contribution to school lunches from $1 to $2 per meal.

Modeled on the sit-ins of the 60s, these Eat-Ins are potluck picnics to raise awareness. They are a call to action for our kids, alongside Slow Food’s signature celebration of local, sustainable, traditional food. Here’s a simple salad that’s delicious and ample enough to bring to to an Eat-In near you.

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-08-17-redo-school-lunch/feed/0school_lunch2_425.jpglucnchFrom southern Spain, the king of summer soupshttp://grist.org/article/2009-08-03-southern-spain-gazpacho-soup/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-08-03-southern-spain-gazpacho-soup/#commentsMon, 03 Aug 2009 21:05:39 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-08-03-southern-spain-gazpacho-soup/]]>Spanish steps to the perfect summer soup.Like Penelope Cruz, my restaurant has a Spanish accent. I can’t quite say “theme,” because the menu is far from 100 percent Spanish; but we focus on tapas and serve classic preperations like paella and sangria. This time of year, our Spanish lilt mandates gazpacho.

Some of the best dishes in the world were invented via that great mother, necessity: the necessity to get by on very little, or to make use of a soon-to-spoil abundance. Witness cassoulet, prosciutto, gumbo, quiche, bouillabaisse, pesto, etc. Gazpacho falls on the abundance side of that truism, as it makes use of just about everything that is ripe and abundant in my restaurant Devotay’s gardens right now.

Originating in Andalusia, the southern part of Spain that includes Gibraltar, the soup most Americans know is probably not the original. When most of Spain was part of the Moorish empire, cooks there developed an ancestor of the now-familiar gazpacho made of garlic, almonds, bread, olive oil, vinegar, and salt. Now called ajo blanco, this was the go-to cold soup in Spain until Columbus returned with from the new world with the curious nightshade, the tomato, one of many New World foods destined to revolutionize world cuisine.

Gazpacho: Southern Spain in a bowl. Today’s most common version contains two new world foods, the tomato and the pepper. The ultimate summer soup, gazpacho also makes an interesting drink when used like a Blood Mary mix (omit the bread from the recipe below for that).

Iowa is renowned for its ungodly hot and humid weather in July and August, and even though we’ve seen an uncharacteristically cool summer thus far, the gazpacho still sells well. We get a lot of vegetarian guests since the menu is about 65 percent veggie, and this dish can be made perfect for the stricter vegans, simply by leaving out the chopped egg garnish.

Gazpacho AndaluzAndalusia is the region of Spain where Jerez, the home of sherry, is located. Sherry is a nice accompaniment to Spain’s most famous soup. Look for a sherry called “Amontillado,” which refers to the medium-dry character of the wine. I like the Gomez or Wisdom & Werter brands.

To peel the tomatoes, use a sharp knife to make an X on the bottom. Plunge them into boiling, salted water for 30 to 45 seconds, or until the skin becomes loose. Immediately “shock” them by placing them in ice water. When they are cool enough to handle (usually just a minute) use the knife to peel the loosened skins away. To seed the tomatoes, cut them in half along the equator and gently squeeze the seeds into a strainer over the sink. Rinse and dry the seeds and save them for next year’s garden.

Now puree the peeled, seeded tomatoes in a blender or food processor along with the onion, peppers, garlic, bread, tomato juice, olive oil and vinegar. You may need to do this in batches. Season to taste with salt and fresh cracked black pepper, then serve, garnished with an ice cube, pinches of the minced peppers and eggs, and a few croutons.

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-08-03-southern-spain-gazpacho-soup/feed/0gazpacho.jpggazpachoandaluciaWith a gust of wind, an Iowa crop duster can squash an organic farmhttp://grist.org/article/2009-07-16-an-iowa-cropduster-can-squash-an-organic-farm/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-07-16-an-iowa-cropduster-can-squash-an-organic-farm/#commentsFri, 17 Jul 2009 02:40:37 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-16-an-iowa-cropduster-can-squash-an-organic-farm/]]>A crop duster in action.Photo: Roger Smith via FlickrGrinnell Heritage Farm is 152 years old. Andrew Dunham is the fifth generation of his family to work this land about 50 miles east of Des Moines. He is a direct descendant of Josiah Grinnell, founder of the town and the man Horace Greeley once famously quoted as having said, “Go west, young man, go west.” Andrew and his wife Melissa are a few months shy of receiving their formal certification as an organic farm.

Across the road, due north of their land, is a field of corn that is managed by the nearby Monsanto seed corn plant. In Iowa and anywhere commodity corn is grown, it is common practice around this time of year to use chemicals to control fungus. Often this is accomplished via the use of aerial application, commonly referred to as cropdusting. On July 6th, a rustic-looking old biplane swooped in to spray Monsanto’s field. To put it mildly, the pilot’s bombardiering skills were not what one would hope.

Dunham’s crew was in the field picking broccoli and spinruts (“turnip” backwards–a Japanese form of the root vegetable). They witnessed the plane as it failed to shut off its spray mechanism in time, and the fungicide drifted into their tree planting and hay field. “The hay ground is in the third year of transition and would have become organically certified on September 1st,” Andrew said. Now, probably not.

You’d think that this would be a clear-cut cause of action, as the legal folks would put it. But the clever folks at Monsanto hire the crop dusters as contractors, and they in turn use a corporate shell with no assets, so when something like this happens and a victim sues, they simply file bankruptcy and then form a new corporation.

Iowa is the single most radically altered landscape in the country. No state has changed more since the arrival of European settlers, and today the land is heavily “mono-cropped.” Nature abhors a lack of diversity, but pathogens love it so farmers respond with more and stronger chemicals to fight off the bugs and weeds and fungi. No one owns the airspace, so planes can fly over any land they choose. Even if the pilots are incredibly accurate, Iowa is a windy place (thus the massive increase in wind energy production here in recent years). Drift is practically inevitable.

Last month in Mississippi, the Clarksdale Press-Register ran a story about the problem of chemical drift. They spoke to a pilot:

Bob Howard, owner of Howard Flying Service, says crop dust pilots like himself are often unfairly singled out as the culprits of drift damage. Howard points out many farmers apply herbicides and pesticides from ground rigs, which if done in high winds, is also susceptible to cause drift injury.

The risk of dusting an off-target field with Roundup is something Howard says is always in the back of his mind when working.

“If everything was Roundup Ready it would be the greatest thing in the world,” Howard said. “If they would all go to Roundup Ready or all go back to conventional farming it would sure be a lot easier on us.”

I’m not sure I would even know where to start with this guy, but let’s try the part where he says that the risk is something that’s “always in the back of his mind.” The back? It’s stunning that someone so obviously shortsighted was able to obtain a pilot’s license. His apathy toward his community and flagrant self-centered simple-mindedness are indicative of the unconscious conspiracy to which so many are a party. They have all been bamboozled into believing in “Better living through chemistry.” So much so, in fact, that the methods most farmers have used for a mere few decades are called “conventional,” and the few who practice farming as it was done for millennia are the outliers. Monsanto’s website even claims that they are “Growing yield sustainably.”

Farmers like Andrew Dunham can do little more than stand in their contaminated fields in stunned silence as Monsanto’s contracted crop dusters continue to fly in the face of logic. But Dunham and his family still manage to produce excellent food. In defiance of negligent crop dusters, here’s a simple and delicious recipe from the Heritage Farm newsletter.

Simmer the kale in a skillet in about 4 cups boiling water. Add salt and stir the greens until tender, about 10-15 minutes. Drain the leaves, toss with the olive oil and add the olives, pepper, and red pepper flakes. Serve hot with lemon wedges.

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-07-16-an-iowa-cropduster-can-squash-an-organic-farm/feed/0crop-duster-sm.jpgCrop dusterAs GOP politicians take the school-lunch debate to new lows, perk up with berry ice creamhttp://grist.org/article/2009-07-02-gop-ice-cream/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-07-02-gop-ice-cream/#commentsThu, 02 Jul 2009 22:40:50 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-02-gop-ice-cream/]]>Stick a spork in it: Is this really the best we can do?Photo: bookgrlA few years ago I was asked to serve on the Wellness Committee that was being formed by the Iowa City School District, under a federal mandate to improve the health of school children. Having made lunch every morning for my kids because I’d seen the “food” they were served in the cafeterias, I was pleased to have the opportunity. The result of my nearly two years of banging my head against the brick wall of district bureaucracy was the living example of the old Upton Sinclair line:

“It is difficult to convince a man of something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”

Admittedly my goals were lofty–not just removing junk food from menus and machines, but also bringing in lots of fresh local produce and planting gardens at the schools. The progress that we did make was indeed positive, if minimal. We produced a set of guidelines that called for more healthy options, and for shutting off the vending machines during lunch (an admittedly pointless activity that any child could work around).

I was thinking about all this when I saw a segment on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” program in which he lists his daily choices for the worst people in the world. The “winner” that night was Cynthia Davis, who represents the 19th District of the state Congress in the place we lovingly call Baja Iowa (most of you call it Missouri). She apparently had the political fortitude–if not aptitude–to pontificate on child hunger.

Her complaint was that the state was funding school lunches for kids even during the summer, when school was out, saying in part, “Anyone under 18 can be eligible? Can’t they get a job during the summer by the time they are 16?” She added–and I am not making this up–“Hunger can be a positive motivator.” She goes on to suggest that the kids can work at McDonald’s where they can eat for free during breaks. Olbermann rightly pointed out here that 1 in 5 Missouri children already is “motivated” by hunger.

A friend who once worked in a McDonald’s assures me that the eating free bit is not in fact the case. But even if it were, this State Representative is flagrantly stating that saving a few tax dollars now is more important that the health and welfare of our children. This from the Chair of the Missouri House Standing Committee on Children and Families.

Back here in Iowa, the state Board of Education finally approved a new set of nutritional guidelines that would promote fresh food. But legislatures have never seen a “well enough” that they could leave alone. So in Des Moines they set the guidelines aside “temporarily” so that they could stand on the floor of the Senate and put forth cogent arguments like this, from Senator Merlin Bartz (R-Grafton):

You know, you’re going to have this exodus of kids walking across the street to the convenience store, or more of ‘em that are just going to say, ‘I’m skipping lunch. I’m bringing my own food. We’re going to be selling Mountain Dew, black market, out of the tops of lockers.’

He also warned colleagues that there would be a backlash if schoolteachers and administrators turn into the “food police.” Ah, where to start?

Senator Bartz, in case you’re reading this, using rhetoric like “food police” is a convenient way to scare people, but it doesn’t begin to describe what should or would happen. The teachers and administrators are responsible not only for the education of our children, but also for their health and well-being while they are in schools. They learn just as much from what they are fed as from what they are taught, perhaps more.

When we tell our children in their health classes that eating a nutritious, balanced diet full of fruits and vegetables is important to their overall health, and then the very same school sells them the very junk they’d just been advised against, just what lesson do we think they will draw? There are no cigarette vending machines in our schools for a very good reason. We must not tell them one thing, and then turn around and sell them something else. It’s the height of hypocrisy.

If a “black market” were to result, it could be easily regulated through the same measures that stop kids from selling drugs from their lockers. And as for kids bringing food from home, they can do that now; and those who do tend to bring healthier, fresher food. Even if they don’t, at least the district is not profiting from peddling fat, sugar, and chemicals to our children.

Might it cost more to bring healthier, preferably local food into our cafeterias? Probably. When someone can show me a higher priority for our society than the health and well-being of our children, then I’ll begin advocating for that as well. But I simply can’t see one.

And now, since it’s freakin’ hot here in Iowa and the berries are coming into season, here’s a tasty berry gelato recipe. It’s a great treat for kids when served on moderate amounts–berries are full of antioxidants. You’ll need an ice cream churn, and there are inexpensive ones to be had. I prefer the type where the cylinder can be frozen separately, but the kind where you have to add ice works just as well.

Combine sugar and water over high heat. Stir until sugar dissolves, heat to a boil, and then boil 3 minutes without stirring.

With the food processor or mixer running on high speed, slowly pour the hot syrup into the egg yolks (go too fast and you’ll get sweet scrambled eggs). Process until the egg yolks are thickened and pale yellow. Turn off the processor and add the berry puree, salt, and lemon juice.

Process until pureed, strain if necessary. Stir in the half and half and refrigerate overnight.

Churn according you your particular machine’s instructions.

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-07-02-gop-ice-cream/feed/0school_lunch.jpglunch'screamFrom grass to grill, a Midwestern farm struts its stuff — and dishes up delicious lamb chopshttp://grist.org/article/2009-06-11-from-grass-to-grill-recipes/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-06-11-from-grass-to-grill-recipes/#commentsThu, 11 Jun 2009 22:54:55 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-11-from-grass-to-grill-recipes/]]>The chefs of “Lambstravaganza.”The best part about my work with Slow Food USA is getting to experience new people, places, and especially great foods. Such was the case this past weekend as I traveled to join the members of Slow Food St. Louis for their fourth annual “Lambstravaganza” at Prairie Grass Farms just outside of New Florence, Mo.

Prairie Grass Farms is in the capable hands of its third generation of Hillebrands. Dave Hillebrand runs the farm now, having inherited it from his father and grandfather before him. There they used to raise primarily row crops, but Dave took an interest in chickens–and eventually in his grandfather’s sheep. Today he and his family raise about 700 lambs a year on their 520 acres, all of it on scrupulously-cared-for prairie grasses (hence the name).

Hillebrand insists that everyone’s health — yours, mine, his, the sheep’s, the earth’s — is tied directly to the soil and to the interaction of plant, animal, and microorganisms in and on it. This philosophy is keeping his family on the farm without resorting to the trap of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that so many Midwest farmers have come to consider their only resort. Those CAFOs are just the opposite of Hillebrand’s methods: they take everything from the earth and give back only pollutants in the form of concentrated manure.

Sheep grazing at Prairie Grass Farms.Sheep and other livestock (he has a few head of cattle and his daughter tends the goats), when allowed to graze free in the pasture, aerate and fertilize the soil constantly. In return, the sheep get plenty of sweet grass and clover, packed full of healthy nutrients that they in turn convert to good milk for the lambs. Chickens remove worms, grubs, and other pests from the soil, add additional fertilizer, and provide the best eggs you’ve ever tasted in a rainbow of colors.

It takes a ratio of about seven to nine ewes and their lambs to each acre of land for all the participating organisms to thrive. Those lambs go to members of Fair Shares CCSA and to some of the best restaurants in St. Louis. Nine chefs from those restaurants were present last Sunday to display their talents and celebrate the Hillebrand family’s hard work and dedication to sustainability.

Their tasting menu (eight small plates) was a testament to the tremendous quality of the meat. Vegans, you may want to skip this next part. Omnivores, get a load of this:

Potted lamb with an assortment of housemade pickles by Margaret Kelly and Dave Owens of Bissinger’s Handcrafted Chocolatier

Vindaloo braised shanks and toasted naan with pepita-coriander pesto and a mango lassi by Andy White of the Schlafly Tap Room

Lamb’s tongue faggotini with consommé and cocoa nibs by Gerard Craft of Niche

Rack of lamb by Lou Rook of Annie Gunn’s

Lamb loin and sweetbreads by Kevin Nashan of Sydney Street Café

Pistachio cream puff with farmers market strawberries, homemeade jam, and local honey by Christy Augustin, also of Sydney Street Café

If you’ll be in the area a year from now, you can participate in the 5th Lambstravaganza by getting on the Slow Food St. Louis listserv and getting your tickets as soon as they go on sale.

In the meantime, here’s a delicious and easy preparation of chops from your local source for lamb. It appeared in my latest book, and is by Chef Jasper Mirabile of Jasper’s in Kansas City.

Grilled Grass-Fed Lamb ChopsJasper writes: Every summer my Nana (Jasper’s Grandmother) would prepare these delicious little chops on the grill. She would marinate the chops in balsamic and garlic and a little bit of red pepper. My three brothers and I would eat the chops faster than my dad could grill them!

Mix the brown sugar, salt, and balsamic vinegar with half of the olive oil. Chop 2 of the mint sprigs coarsely and add to this marinade. Pour the marinade over the chops, turning each to get them thoroughly coated. Marinate in the refrigerator overnight.

Day of service: First thing in the morning, turn each chop once so that they marinate evenly.

A note about your grill: Gas grills are adequate, and need to be heated roughly half an hour in advance. Real wood always brings better flavor, though. I recommend using real wood charcoal, not briquettes. A good source for this is Cowboy Charcoal from Brentwood, Tenn. A charcoal fire needs about an hour to reach that white-ashed glow that’s perfect to cook on.

While the grill is warming up, mix the rest of the olive oil with the mint jelly and garlic.

Place the chops on the grill, being careful not to crowd your surface area. Grill them in batches if necessary. Baste each side with the mint sauce (Nana used to use a mint sprig to baste with). Cook approximately 5 minutes on each side, or to desired doneness. Serve immediately with remaining basting sauce for dipping.

Serves 6

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-06-11-from-grass-to-grill-recipes/feed/0friese_lamb_400x266.jpgchefs.Sheep in a fieldlamb chops.From “local” Lays to Oprah’s KFC promo, hypocrisy abounds in the food worldhttp://grist.org/article/2009-05-29-oprah-kfc-hypocrisy/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-05-29-oprah-kfc-hypocrisy/#commentsFri, 29 May 2009 22:03:07 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-05-29-oprah-kfc-hypocrisy/]]>War is peace, junk food is real food….Nobody likes hypocrites, despite the fact that everyone is a hypocrite to one degree or another: the smoker who tells her kids not to smoke; the closeted politician who works against gay rights; the police officer who throws the book at stoners but who himself gets high. But in the matter of marketing food, hypocrisy reaches a fever pitch.

Take last month’s flap about Oprah Winfrey’s KFC promotion. While the MSM focused on the feeding frenzy that ensued, and the near-riots when KFCs across the country ran out of food or people couldn’t download their coupons from the website, precious few (apart from here on Grist anyway) were commenting on Oprah’s hypocrisy in promoting KFC after she had done so much to promote the cause of animal cruelty prevention. She was even named “Person of the Year” last year by PETA. Yet while KFC continues to buy Tyson chicken, which is raised in heartbreaking conditions, de-beaked and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, Oprah apparently has no trouble promoting the company. Perhaps the greater hypocrisy lies with PETA, though; they’ve refused to call her out on the issue.

KFC is not blameless in hypocrite rankings either, foisting their products as fresh and healthy, hiding the true costs of cheap food, and claiming that it’s cheaper than making the food at home. To their credit, KFC parent company YUM! Brands did cave to the Coalition for Immokalee Workers and their demand for a fair living wage for tomato pickers, but that was after years of protests and even more years of slavery in South Florida.

One member of the list of underwriters on the public radio show Marketplace is what truly pins my ears back though. The Monsanto Corporation bills itself, there and on their website, as “dedicated to sustainability.” Please.

I am a great fan of George Orwell and have read all his books, and so I recognize Orwellian double-speak when I hear it. For the inventors of Terminator Seeds (from which plants grow, but the resulting seeds are sterile), Zombie Seeds (which will not grow until treated with a Monsanto-patented chemical); and Utility Patents on Seeds (giving them ownership rights not just on the seeds but on all their progeny) to stake some claim on “sustainability” may well be the height of hypocrisy.

The Orwellian rebranding does not end there, though. Last month Frito-Lay announced a new ad campaign in five states, beginning with Florida, referring to their Lay’s Potato Chips as “local food.” Strictly speaking I suppose it is since some of their potatoes are grown and fried in Florida. But by this logic, all of us here in Iowa can begin referring to high fructose corn syrup as a local food as well. That’s the same HFCS that the corn processing industry calls “an American agricultural product” in their ads. Local Lay’s are just the beginning of industrial food’s latest foray into absconding with another useful term. They took “natural,” they redefined “organic,” they’re taking “sustainable,” and now they want “local,” all the while changing the meaning of the words instead of their own detrimental practices.

I don’t know if there is another reason for this behavior besides profit, but I doubt it. And I shan’t be hypocritical myself in this regard, as a business owner and father of two kids in college, I am in favor of profit. But when lowering prices increases hidden costs to our environment, our health system, and our security– witness swine flu, possibly to an enormous Mexican hoglot owned by Smithfield–then that is false profit indeed.

So, my hypocrisy? You’ll not catch me at a drive-thru, but I do confess to liking Ramen noodles–and Lay’s potato chips, for that matter. But I also make my own chips at home. Here’s how.

The chips are upHome-Made Potato Chips

2 “Idaho” russet potatoes, scrubbed clean (or peeled, if you prefer)2 quarts of your preferred oil (I like peanut oil. Soy is good too, as long as it’s the non-GMO stuff.)Salt to taste

Unless you are quite skilled with a knife, you’ll want a tool called a mandolin. This has nothing to do with the stringed instrument; a kitchen mandolin is essentially the same thing Ron Popeil used to hawk on late night TV–it dices, it slices, it does almost everything but wash the dishes and walk the dog. Mandolins range from inexpensive plastic versions in the Asian markets to $200 stainless steel French versions. Pick up the sturdiest one you can afford and treat it with respect–it’s very sharp and it doesn’t care what it slices and dices, be it potatoes or your knuckles.

Preheat the oil in a saucepan or electric fryer to 375 degrees, no more no less. Meanwhile:

Using your mandolin, carefully slice your potatoes paper-thin. Place them in the oil just a few slices at a time, for about 1 minute, then remove them to paper towels. Once they have all been pre-fried in this way (it’s called “blanched” in the industry), then refry them – again in small batches – for about 3 minutes until they are crispy. Remove to fresh paper towels and repeat for the rest of the batches. Salt to taste as soon as they come out of the oil.

Another caution: deep-frying can be hazardous. If you are doing it on the stovetop, be sure to use a much larger pan, one that’s deep enough that the oil won’t boil over. Nothing spoils an appetite like a house fire.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-05-29-oprah-kfc-hypocrisy/feed/0hypocrite.jpghypccritechipsIn the lush dirt of Iowa, community grows alongside veggieshttp://grist.org/article/2009-05-07-iowa-community-veggies/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-05-07-iowa-community-veggies/#commentsThu, 07 May 2009 21:10:37 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-05-07-iowa-community-veggies/]]>ZJ Farms: Everyone’s a farmhandI had the pleasure the other day of visiting ZJ Farms, the anchor of Local Harvest CSA, which is one of the biggest in the area. Farmer (and pillar of the local food scene hereabouts) Susan Jutz has been running this organic farm for all the years I’ve been buying food around here. A walk on her farm gives you an understanding of the paintings of Grant Wood.

In case you’re unfamiliar, CSA means community-supported agriculture –a new name for what family-scale farming used to be. These days it works very much like a magazine subscription. You pay up front, usually in the late winter when the farmer really needs it, and in return you share in the bounty throughout the season. In these parts the season lasts roughly 20 weeks, so for each of those weeks we’ll receive a box full of all the fresh goodness that’s in season right then, usually picked that same morning.

Even though it’s just me and my wife at home these days, I still buy a full “family share.” I take what I want to cook with at home, and the rest goes to my restaurant, where my crew uses it for specials and such. Every Wednesday the cooks are always excited to see what’s in the box – they unload it like kids on Christmas morning. The box, of course, gets returned to be used for the next week’s bounty.

Laura Dowd of Local Foods Connection, left, and Susan Jutz of ZJ FarmsPhoto: Kurt Michael FrieseBuying a share of the bounty also means buying a share of the risk. It’s been a cold wet spring here in Iowa, so many plants aren’t even in the ground yet. I saw thousands of seedlings in Susan’s hoop house, each one yearning to breathe free sometime after Mother’s day – the traditional end of the danger of frost here. This means the season will start a little later this year, but all of us will gladly take that over last year’s disastrous storms and floods. ZJ Farms was high and dry, but some savage straight winds did take out her 100-year-old barn, sheeps and pigs still inside.

That barn is still being cleaned up a year later, but volunteers from Local Foods Connection, an organization Susan helped create, have been helping out. LFC is a charity that helps get fresh wholesome food to needy families. Volunteers do work on area farms, and in return farmers give CSA shares to the charity, which in turn gives them to the families. There is also a wonderful educational component too. Families are encouraged to learn about the foods, and how to cook them. They earn points that can be redeemed for kitchen tools.

Families are also required to visit one of the farms. Often they are reluctant, but LFC founder and president Laura Dowd says that the only thing harder than getting them to visit the farms is getting them to leave. Many of the families have never had the opportunity to see a working farm up close, and that is intrinsically rewarding for anyone.

So now we await our first box, expected the week of the 18th. I’ll be looking for asparagus, and radishes, and lots of baby greens. They’ll probably all end up in a salad topped with Devotay’s own balsamic vinaigrette.

Mix the oils together. Place shallots, mustard, pepper and salt into food processor and chop fine. Add vinegar and pulse. While running the processor, slowly add the olive and soy oils to emulsify. It may not all fit, so mix in remaining oil in bowl with a whip.

Make plenty–this dressing will keep in the refrigerator for weeks.

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-05-07-iowa-community-veggies/feed/0zjfarms3.jpgzj far,farmerladyWhat we eat when we eat alonehttp://grist.org/article/what-we-eat-when-we-eat-alone1/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/what-we-eat-when-we-eat-alone1/#commentsThu, 30 Apr 2009 05:56:30 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/what-we-eat-when-we-eat-alone1/]]>My dear friend Deborah Madison has created a delightful book called What We Eat When We Eat Alone, an investigation into some of our most intimate moments. When no one is looking, no one is judging, and your most secret cravings can come out, what do you eat? And how?

As a companion/intro, Deb has created this YouTube video (less than 5 minutes long — watch below) interviewing a few of the many people she spoke to for the book. All walks of life are there, and the responses are fascinating, tell-tale vignettes in their own right. Illustrations are provided by her husband Patrick McFarlin. Stop into to your local independent bookseller and pick up a copy now (or if you like, Amazon has it here).

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/what-we-eat-when-we-eat-alone1/feed/0From a zingy spring herb, a soup for sipping on the porchhttp://grist.org/article/2009-04-23-zingy-herb-soup/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-04-23-zingy-herb-soup/#commentsThu, 23 Apr 2009 19:30:12 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-23-zingy-herb-soup/]]>Leaves of sassbeckyannisonGardeners and gastronomes fawn over sorrel — and almost everyone else ignores it. That’s a shame. An early-spring green with brash lemony flavor that comes from an abundance of oxalic acid, sorrel is a powerful addition to soups and sauces, and tasty in salads when picked young.

The herb is classified in the genus Rumex, and its origins lie somewhere in what is now Russia, where the Ural Mountains divide Asia from Europe. It was well known in Roman times, though not cultivated since it was plentiful in the wild. Culinary historians find it falling in and out of favor throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, and it seemed to do a curious dance over the English Channel as at times the French preferred it, then the English more so, then back again. It was popular in the court of King Henry VIII, then all but eradicated from the British Isles by the late 1800s when it had danced over to the US.

Still by the middle of the 20th century and even today most of the time, if you want sorrel in America you have to grow it yourself. Thankfully, very few things are easier to cultivate. It loves this bizarre spring we’ve had here in Iowa, with cool sunny days alternating with lots of rain. And it’s a perennial, so once you have it, it’s there to stay. It has no pest problems since that oxalic acid is a great natural defense, and the yield is quite high because you can keep clipping it all spring, and harvest again in the fall. A single sorrel planting can yield well for eight or ten years before needing to be replanted.

If you’d like to grow some at home, plant sorrel seed in early spring (it’s almost too late already, but not quite) in compost-enriched soil about a half-inch deep and six inches apart. When the plants are seven or eight inches high, thin them to 12 inches apart, and make sure they stay well watered. As they grow, cut the leaves for use and wait for what seems like just a minute before the new leaves jump back up. Later in the summer, you’ll see the buds of rust-red flowers begin to appear. Pinch these off unless you want more seed, else you’ll see little yield in the fall.

After three or four years, dig up the plants and split them at the root. Give a few to your friends and plant the rest in another sunny, fertile part of the garden for a few more years. It’s that easy.

In the kitchen, sorrel matches its ease of cultivation with simple versatility. The young leaves add a potent zing to baby green-salads. As they get older, they leaves are popular in fish dishes, classically shad or pike. Anything that likes lemon will like sorrel, so veal, chicken and pork dishes can benefit from it as well. Perhaps the most popular use is this eye-opening chilled sorrel soup, perfect for your first lunch on the patio:

In a blender or food processor, chop the sorrel and shallot to a fine puree. Gradually add the stock and continue to blend, stopping occasionally to scrape down the sides of the bowl, until all the stock is mixed in.

Add the crème fraîche and the cream and pulse lightly until just incorporated. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then chill one hour to overnight. Serve very cold garnished with tarragon or mint. If desired you could also add more crème fraîche, some croutons, even an ice cube.

Get thee to a CAFO!Photo: pubwvjIn a recent op-ed, in The New York Times gravely informed its readers that free-range pork is deadly stuff.

Despite evidence that incidence of trichinosis is very rare in the US–about 40 cases a year, and mostly caused by eating wild game (usually bear)-James E. McWilliams says that pork laced with the deadly parasite is just one example of how locavores are “endangering the future of food.”Mr. McWilliams, a history professor at Texas State University also wrote in the Times 2 years back that measuring food miles was bunk and that they were not an accurate measure of a food’s carbon footprint (again despite proof to the contrary, see this pdf from Rich Pirog at the Leopold Center, and these LTE responses).In addition, he likes to scare us with titles like this one from Slate: “Rusted Roots: Is organic agriculture polluting our food with heavy metals?”

As Upton Sinclair said, it’s difficult to convince a man of something when his salary depends on him not understanding it, and the study Mr. McWilliams cites was funded by the National Pork Producers Council, whose job it is to defend the interests of the major confinement hog producers and processors.It is of course exceedingly unlikely that the study would have found any differently than it did.Even if we were to take the Pork Board at their word, Paula Crossfield’s excellent rebuttal demonstrates why it’s really just bunkum.The short version is that the study found antibodies, not actual Trichinosis.

If that were not enough, there are numerous studies finding that the food industry is following the playbook of big tobacco, a tactic called FUD – sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the public mind.See Tom Laskawy’s explanation on Grist, and the more science-minded version at e360.

Change is always fought, and power never relinquishes willingly.But the tied is turning in favor of Good, Clean, and Fair food.We simply do not have the bankroll to compete mano-a-mano with Big Ag on the stage of public opinion.So we’ll have to beat them with passion, logic, and law that brings better tasting, healthier food, rebuilds rural communities, improves the health of our children, and brings more jobs to more farms.

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-04-12-free-range-pork/feed/0pasturepig-small.jpgPastured hogStalking the wild leeks of springhttp://grist.org/article/2009-04-09-stalking-leeks-of-spring/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/2009-04-09-stalking-leeks-of-spring/#commentsThu, 09 Apr 2009 09:23:59 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-09-stalking-leeks-of-spring/]]>On-ramp to flavorPhoto: dano272Early-spring walks in the woods are rewarding on their own. But while you enjoy those first few sunny days after a nourishing spring rain, why not look for things that can feed your belly as well as your soul? The woodlands here in the upper Midwest are teeming with gourmet goodies in the spring, and this abundance is there for the taking–if you just know where to look.

Gathering wild foods is probably the most sustainable, and certainly the most ancient way to provide delicious and nourishing local food for your family. It dates back to before the dawn of our species, and continues to this day (how’s that for sustainable?). Archeologists have uncovered the remains of a 6000 year old man, and in the pouch found with him were several mushrooms. The arrow in his back may have indicated that he was foraging in someone else’s territory. Such severe penalties are less likely today, but it’s still a good idea to make sure you have the landowner’s permission.

Today our innate instinct to gather has been redirected toward grocery stores and shopping malls — yet the the hunter-gatherer within remains with us, just as surely as it didwith the “Mushroom Man.” Sadly, the tools and tricks our ancestors used to find wild edibles have been replaced by knowing which coupons to clip and which grocery has the best deal on frozen pizza. It need not be so, and learning a little bit about the Heartland’s easiest-to-find spring delicacies is the best place to start.

The first to sprout through the damp forest floor is likely to be ramps. Otherwise known as wild leeks (Allium tricoccum), these relatives of onions, garlic and shallots inspire weekend-long festivals in the Appalachians, where their flavor is much stronger — some might say overwhelming. Hear in the Midwest they are milder — much easier to appreciate — and prolific. Those of you in the Chicago area can enjoy them this weekend at The Land Connection’s 5th annual RampFest.

They can be picked in April, when they have two or three long, flat leaves; or sometimes they are left until summer and then only the bulbs are used. To find them, look for moist and swampy woodlands favoring those plants that take advantage of the sunlight that penetrates to the forest floor before the trees leaf out. Look for their long, slender leaves and somewhat red stems in clumps around the bases of oak trees.

They can be eaten fresh, pickled, sautéed or grilled, and a fine julienne of the young leaves makes an excellent salad garnish.

Here’s a simple way to enjoy them as a snack, appetizer of side dish:Grilled Ramps

Clean the ramps by trimming away the root end right at the base, and also by trimming any wilted leaves away.

Toss with the oil, parsley, salt and pepper, then grill very quickly over high heat until slightly charred and tender. A grill basket is sometimes helpful to keep the ramps from falling through the grate.

Serve immediately with your favorite dip, such as aioli or ranch dressing.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-04-09-stalking-leeks-of-spring/feed/1ramps2.jpgRampsFor some families, the holidays are all about the grubhttp://grist.org/article/seasons-eatings/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/seasons-eatings/#commentsFri, 12 Dec 2008 02:02:21 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/seasons-eatings/]]>

This is the holiday season in just about every culture. I was born and raised a Unitarian Universalist, thus of the Judeo-Christian background, so in my house it’s Christmastime. For some folks, Christmas is about peace and good tidings. For others it is a joyous celebration of the birth of their savior. In my family it was, and still is, all about the food. It’s about presence rather than presents.

There are many items that must be on the table, or else it simply is not Christmas. Among these are the clam dip, the wild-rice dressing, grandma’s cranberries, and mom’s bourbon pound cake. I’ve shared all these recipes before in this space and others, save the pound cake, which is a very closely guarded family recipe. The secret is to … nope, still not going to tell you. I will say this, however: Last year my mother learned that you can’t make up for not having the last 3/4 cup of all-purpose flour by replacing it with 3/4 cup of bread flour — unless making a doorstop is your intended result.

My wife Kim’s family had different food traditions, including oyster stew and tamales (odd for her Scots-German heritage) as well as some more Midwest-conventional items like green bean casserole and a lemon Jell-O mold of pineapples and carrots that was on every holiday table at her grandmother’s home in Decorah, Iowa. But the best tradition of her family, and the one that made it so easy for us to combine our holiday traditions when we married more than 20 years ago, was cornbread and beans.

Kim’s mother and grandmother both used Jiffy Mix for their cornbread, but Kim married a chef, so now we make it from scratch every Christmas Eve. We are all the more grateful for the rich and luxurious feast on Christmas Day, which offers a counterpoint of good fortune alongside the prior night’s nod of respect to a time not so long ago when our families could afford no more than cornbread and beans for their holiday supper. We must always remember that our family was not always so fortunate, and tomorrow once again may not be.

Our cornbread ritual is also intended as a symbolic reminder of the far-too-numerous people in this country and around the world who are, as the current vernacular would have it, “food insecure.” Through Slow Food, much of my time is occupied with these issues. My kids, however, have grown up never knowing the fear of wondering where their next meal would come from. I was fortunate enough to grow up the same way. But my father was born to immigrants during the Great Depression, and that experience influenced much more about the family than simply making it frugal.

The tradition in which I was raised teaches of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and also of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations; lessons preached by nearly every religious belief in one way or another. But learning these lessons and applying them are different matters. To apply them we must do more than simply see that there are a billion people starving in the world and a billion more paradoxically overweight and undernourished. We must insist that something be done. To that end we donate time, money, and resources, and we advocate for change on a local, national, and global level. One example of an organization we support, one we hope to help spread nationwide, is Local Foods Connection.

This innovative approach uses a number of techniques to provide CSA shares to underprivileged families. They do more than merely supplying fresh food, though. They provide education on how to prepare it, how to grow it at home, where it comes from, and why it’s better for you. Families visit the farms and participate from plant to plate. Imagine the impact if this idea were to spread nationwide: struggling families receiving healthful, locally produced food instead of empty calories.

So many people are focused on their own finances, their own concerns, wondering how to get the Wii console when they don’t know if they’ll be employed next month. While I believe firmly that the philosophy we all learn on airplanes — put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you — can be useful in everyday life, sometimes the right thing to do is reach out and help others no matter what your own situation may be. That might be as simple as inviting someone to your table for some cornbread and beans.

Like all good holiday traditions, the ritual of production, presentation, and consumption must be adhered to in order to experience the full effect. The cornbread must be served warm, sliced horizontally, and spread with butter (not margarine). The beans must be navy beans, cooked simply in salted water, and ladled piping hot over the buttered cornbread. The dish is then garnished with diced yellow onions, hand-chopped pickled hot peppers, and white vinegar.

The only exception to this rule belonged to Kim’s brother Scott, who since he was a toddler refused the cornbread and beans, so his doting grandmother made macaroni and cheese for him. Today homemade mac-and-cheese is an odd, starchy, but satisfying side dish on our Christmas Eve table.

Iowa Cornbread

Though it divides in half easily, this cornbread recipe makes a large batch, because I hope plenty of family and many friends surround your holiday table.

Combine all dry ingredients thoroughly in a large mixing bowl. Separately combine the beaten egg, buttermilk, and melted butter or lard. Add the liquid to the dry (and add the cheese and scallions, if desired) and fold to combine until just evenly moist.

Spoon the mixture into the greased dish and bake in center of oven for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/seasons-eatings/feed/0holiday-food_h528.jpgReclaiming the beauty of Thanksgivinghttp://grist.org/article/our-best-holiday/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/our-best-holiday/#commentsWed, 26 Nov 2008 07:12:39 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/our-best-holiday/]]>Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

– Cicero

In a couple of days, we’ll celebrate our best, most important holiday. While celebrations of the harvest have existed for as long as civilization (for indeed it was agriculture that necessitated both), this particular holiday is uniquely American. Or at least it was until other former British colonies started having a festival called Thanksgiving too.

There are those who enjoy pointing out the tragic irony of the American Thanksgiving: that it was originally a celebration of the bountiful harvest provided by the native inhabitants of this land, who were subsequently slaughtered by the beneficiaries of that kindness. But the tragedy of one action does not undo the beauty of another.

The beauty of that original day of Thanksgiving rests in their acknowledgment of the good fortune which they received: divine grace, spiritual enlightenment, or karma; call it what you will. Those pilgrims and those natives saw the bounty before them and had the dignity, respect, and intelligence to be grateful.

As is so often said, our holidays are debased by crass commercialism and lose their meaning in a flurry of planning, worry, and family frenzy. Christmas becomes a day about Santa Claus, Easter about a rabbit, Independence Day about fireworks, and Thanksgiving about football and a four-day weekend (oh, and shopping for Christmas). We forget that the original point is to wallow not in gluttony, but gratitude.

Thoreau said, “He who distinguishes the true savor of his food cannot be a glutton. He who does not, cannot be otherwise.” That “true savor” must include respect and gratefulness for the source of the food, for the provider of the food, and for the food itself.

Lacking gratitude for the bounty we enjoy demonstrates not just a lack of respect for nature and God, but a lack of self-respect as well. Judeo-Christian (and other) prayers before a meal give thanks to God; Native American (and other) traditions thank the very animal on which they feast. Each represents a recognition of our own place in the world. To sit at a table with nourishing food in front of you and the people you love all around you yet not feel thankful reveals not only a lack of self-worth but a certain degree of foolishness as well.

And so, while gratitude should be acknowledged, felt, and practiced every day, we set aside one particular day each fall to celebrate the harvest and pay special attention to that which makes it possible for us to do everything else we do in this life. Food transforms us even as it is transformed into us. No truer cliché ever existed than “You are what you eat.” But if it is so, then most Americans are fast, cheap, and easy. Thanksgiving is the one day of the year that most people actually practice the ideals of Slow Food.

Next time you eat, whether around a sumptuous table or behind the wheel at the drive-thru, stop for just a moment to consider what makes you truly thankful.

I am thankful for my family more than anything else, for they are my true sources of sustenance and joy. I am thankful for my awareness of the importance and impact of my food. I am thankful for crisp autumn mornings and rain and my dogs. I am thankful that I am still on the right side of the grass.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/our-best-holiday/feed/0To make the Thanksgiving centerpiece a sure triumph, go heritage — and reach for the deep-fryerhttp://grist.org/article/let-the-turkey-soar/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/let-the-turkey-soar/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2008 07:23:35 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/let-the-turkey-soar/]]>

Fry ya later, alligator.

In the 11 years between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, arguments raged over the future of the nascent nation. One involved the naming of a National Bird. Writing to his daughter on the subject of his choice for the symbol in 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turkey is peculiar to ours.” I’ve often wondered what effect there would have been on our national character had Mr. Franklin prevailed.

Nonetheless, thanks to America’s best holiday, the turkey has earned an honored place in our traditions at the table. Though I speak from no personal experience, I suspect that turkey is also far tastier than the handsome soaring scavenger that is our national bird.

Each year around this time, home cooks across the country get uptight about their Thanksgiving meal, fretting that they’ll over- (or under-) cook the main course. I’ll help you with that in a moment, but first I should point out that as with any cooking, the better the ingredients you begin with, the better the dish you end up with.

Bowling with Butterballs

The commercially available turkey which some of us used to bowl down the aisles of local groceries at 3 a.m. back in college is useful for very little else. It is flavorless. It is laden with hormones and antibiotics, and leads a tortured, stupid, flightless, and sexless existence in a pen somewhere in Arkansas. True turkeys, contrary to popular belief, are not stupid, can fly, and are permitted to live happy turkey lives out in the open. One of many resources for such magnificent birds is Local Harvest.

Are they more expensive? Yes. But this 14-pound turkey from K&M farms will, at $75, feed a family of 10, so that means $7.50 per person. Surely worth it for the holidays, at least for those with the means. For those who are on tighter budgets, you could of course get a much cheaper turkey at the grocery store. But consider cutting corners somewhere else instead of on the centerpiece of the holiday meal.

Once you’ve chosen your turkey, what to do with it? Sure, cooking a 14-pound bird presents challenges, but it’s eminently doable. Roasting is, of course, the most common method, and can deliver a quite-tasty bird if done well, which is not too challenging. The main thing to remember is not to overcook it, and the way to monitor that is with a meat thermometer. Roast the bird at 350 F, plan for about 20 minutes per pound, and baste and rotate frequently. When it reaches 161 F, remove and cover loosely with foil or a lid, and let rest for about twenty minutes before carving. This redistributes the juices.

For added flavor and juiciness, consider brining the bird. To do this, you need a bucket big enough (and clean enough!) for the bird, and refrigeration space big enough for the bucket. This time of year, my garage is often just the right temperature (it needs to be between 34 and 42 to be safe). For the brine, mix 1/2 cup of kosher salt and 1/4 cup of brown sugar per gallon of ice-cold water, and make enough of this ratio to totally immerse your bird in the bucket. Brine this way for about 8 hours, inverting the bird once halfway through, and rinse well before roasting as above. You’ll be pleased with the result.

I got an email last week asking for my method for deep-frying a turkey, so here that is, but first a note of caution: Do not — under any circumstances — do this inside your home, in your garage, or on your patio or deck. Do this on pavement, well clear of obstacles and flammable things. Nothing spoils the mood of the holidays like a house fire.

Ingredients:1 heritage turkey, any size30 pounds (yep, 30 pounds — or as much as needed for smaller birds) of lard, though peanut oil works. Heck, live a little — nothing wrong with lard.2 tablespoons each of salt, minced garlic, and paprika1 tablespoon cracked black pepperOlive oil as needed

Procedure:Place the lard in the pot over a medium flame on the cooker. Once again, I highly recommend doing this outdoors, on the lawn. This way if there is an accident, you end up with a scorched spot in your lawn and a dirty turkey instead of a burned-down house and a ruined holiday.

While the lard is heating up to 375 F, and being closely monitored and protected from children and pets, wash the bird in cool water and pat dry, inside and out. Mix the spices with just enough oil to make a paste. Rub this marinade all over the bird, inside and out, then place the bird on the rack or wire by running through the cavity from the neck end to the open end.

Allow the bird to marinate, covered, while the lard continues to heat. This may take an hour or two since you want to bring it up to temperature gradually (it’s safer that way).

Once the oil is at 375 degrees, hang the wire from a long, strong dowel and have someone help you gradually lower the bird into the oil. Most of the accidents folks have had doing this are a result of putting the bird in the fat too fast, causing it to boil over and ignite. So, gradually lower the bird into the fat, and hook your wire on the edge of the pot.

Allow the turkey to cook for 4 minutes per pound. At the end of that time, gradually lift the bird from the lard using the dowel. Have someone standing by with a large casserole dish to catch the bird as it comes out of the oil. Check the internal temperature with the meat thermometer. When it reaches 165 degrees, carefully bring it inside (don’t forget to turn off the cooker, unless you have other fish to fry).

Cover the turkey with foil and allow to rest for 20-30 minutes, then carve as usual and enjoy.

Recently, the American public was issued a challenge by the folks at KFC (formerly “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” but “fried” just didn’t sound healthy). The fast-food joint argues in its latest commercial that you cannot “create a family meal for less than $10.” Their example is the “seven-piece meal deal,” which includes seven pieces of fried chicken, four biscuits, and a side dish — in this case, mashed potatoes with gravy. This is meant to serve a family of four.

I’m not really a competitive soul, but this was one challenge I could not resist. When it comes to food, America has been sold a bill of goods. We’ve been flimflammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked. We’ve been tricked into thinking that cooking is a chore, like washing windows, to be avoided if at all possible, and then done only grudgingly and when absolutely necessary. On the contrary, cooking is a vital, spiritual act that should be performed with a certain reverence. After all, we are providing sustenance to the ones we love — can anything be more important?

And don’t get me started on advertising. It never ceases to amaze me that, with the exception of political ads, people don’t focus on the falsehoods. Commercial advertising washes over people without the slightest analysis; we truly need a FactCheck.org for business advertising.

In the KFC commercial, a mother and two kids hit a grocery store for the necessary ingredients. When they fail to get them for under $10, Mom cheerfully announces, to the kids’ delight, that they are going to KFC. In these hard economic times, Colonel Sanders wants you to think that giving him your money is the cheaper way to go. I respectfully disagree.

Groceries, Point Blank

The ingredients shown or mentioned in the ad include seven pieces of chicken, a five-pound bag of flour, and — in an oh-so-adorable scene featuring the son and a clueless store clerk — “seven secret herbs and spices.” The rest of the ingredients are presumably edited out for time.

The grocery store itself has the look of a somewhat higher-end place (read: more like a Whole Foods than a Wal-Mart). Since we don’t have a Whole Foods in Iowa, and I can’t get myself to give Wal-Mart money, I compromised and shopped at a local independent grocery called the Bread Garden Market. They do a nice job of splitting the difference between organic and everyday; in other words, they carry both Kashi and corn flakes, tofu and ground beef.

The recipes I used are available to anyone with access to The Joy of Cooking (mine’s the May 1985 edition), but for convenience they’re at the end of this article.

I compared commodity products and organic ones, and calculated for each. The market had only one kind of chicken. It was far from the free-range, organic, local chicken I would normally use, but it was hormone-free from a network of family farms and faced nowhere near the cruel conditions suffered by KFC’s chickens. One of the latter would have been even cheaper than the $4.76 I paid for this one. In fairness I should note that the little girl in KFC’s ad asks the butcher for seven pieces, already cut up, but I have faith that a home cook can cut up a whole chicken. I should also note that KFC cuts chicken breasts in half, so there are 10 pieces in a whole bird (four breast halves, two legs, two thighs, two wings).

I rounded up everything I needed for chicken, biscuits, and mashed potatoes with gravy and totaled my costs, accounting for ingredients that were a fraction of a cent (small amounts of spices, for example) by rounding up to $0.01. I must admit I don’t know the seven secret herbs and spices, but as a professional chef, I know you can do an awful lot with salt and pepper. The bottom line? The KFC meal, including Iowa state sales tax of 6 percent, is $10.58. I made the same meal (chicken, four biscuits, mashed potatoes, and gravy) for $7.94 — and I got three extra pieces of chicken and a carcass to use for soup.

Even allowing for the whole batch of 24 biscuits, the meal still comes in at $8.45. In fact, using organic or other high-end items where the market carried them (flour, grapeseed oil, butter, milk), my total bill for the meal came to $10.62. Here’s a GoogleDocs spreadsheet of my prices in case you want to check my math or compare your own recipe.

I can already hear folks saying, “Sure, but how long did it take you?” Yes, it took a little longer than the drive-thru, but it is important to recognize the value of spending time preparing a good home-cooked meal. How is it, after all, that with all the modern conveniences afforded us in the 21st century, we still don’t think we have the time to do something everyone had time for until the middle of the 20th century?

In America, if we are what we eat, most of us are fast, cheap, and easy. We should aspire to be more, and gathering the family around the table is the best way I know how. Bring your family together around a home-cooked meal. Get them involved in the preparation. Do it so often that it’s no longer an unusual thing in your house. It’ll beat the drive-thru every time because it has the most important ingredient: love.

Kurt’s Seven-Piece Meal Deal

The following recipes were adapted from The Joy of Cooking, 1985 edition.

Heat the fat in a large frying pan until fragrant. Meanwhile dredge the chicken pieces in flour, then place in pan. Brown lightly, then turn and brown other side. Turn down heat to medium-low and continue cooking, 35-40 minutes, turning frequently, until cooked through. Serve immediately.

Poultry Pan Gravy (pg. 341)

1/4 cup fat from frying pan1/4 cup flour left from dredgingChopped giblets from the bird, if you likeEnough boiling water from the mashed potatoes to make 2 cups (or boiling stock, if you have it made already)Salt and black pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a new pan over medium-high heat and add flour to make a roux (a thickener made of equal parts flour and fat). Cook, stirring constantly, for 3-5 minutes. Add giblets and boiling water or stock. Simmer 15 minutes. Season to taste and serve immediately.

Boil the potatoes in 4 cups of water until tender (about 20 minutes). Strain and reserve water for gravy if desired, and mash potatoes to desired texture with remaining ingredients. Adjust seasonings to taste and serve immediately.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.Sift together the dry ingredients, then cut in the butter or lard. Stir in the buttermilk until just incorporated, then turn out onto a floured surface and knead for 30 seconds. Pat down to 1/4 of an inch thick, then cut with biscuit cutter.Bake on sheet pan 10-12 minutes.

Posted in Food ]]>http://grist.org/article/colonel-of-truth/feed/0KFC-ten-dollar-challenge_h528.jpgFrom Iowa’s apple orchards, a delicious heirloom and a recipe for stuffinghttp://grist.org/article/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-delicious-apple/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-delicious-apple/#commentsFri, 17 Oct 2008 02:16:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-delicious-apple/]]>This column is an excerpt from Friese’s new bookA Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland.

Truly scrumptious: the “red delicious” apple’s heirloom antecedent.

Photo: Kurt Michael Friese

One cool spring morning about 1880, a farmer in Madison County, Iowa, named Jesse Hiatt was walking the rows of his young orchard when he noticed a chance seedling growing between the rows. An orderly man, he preferred that his trees grow in an organized fashion, and he chopped the seedling down. The seedling grew back the following year, and so he chopped it down again. When the seedling sprouted back up a third time, legend has it Mr. Hiatt said to the tree, “If thee must grow, thee may.”

Hiatt nurtured the tree for 10 years. When it finally came to fruition, Hiatt was pleased with the red and yellow streaked appearance and the sweet, impressive flavor. He named it the Hawkeye after his adopted home state and began to seek a nursery to propagate his discovery. Eight or 10 of them turned him down before his big break came.

He sent some of the fruit to a contest in Louisiana, Missouri, which was seeking new varieties of fruit trees, especially apples. The Stark Brothers Fruit Company held the competition as part of their search for an apple tree to replace the then-most-popular tree, the Ben Davis. The Ben Davis apple had a nice appearance and was durable in shipping and weather-hardy but lacking in flavor. When Clarence Stark tasted the apple with the unusual oblong shape and the distinctive five bumps on the bottom, he pronounced it “Delicious!” Unfortunately, due to some poor record keeping, Hiatt’s name and address were lost, and it wasn’t until Hiatt reentered the competition the following year that his Hawkeye was officially declared the winner.

The Stark Brothers Fruit Company bought the rights to Hiatt’s discovery and began taking cuttings from the original tree at Hiatt’s Winterset farm. Study led them to the conclusion that this new variety was probably the result of an accidental cross of two very old varieties, the Bellflower and the Winesap. Sixty years later, Stark had sold more than 10 million trees worldwide that were all descendants of that original tree. They had renamed Hiatt’s Hawkeye after Clarence Stark’s original pronouncement, and the Delicious apple was on its way to becoming the most popular apple variety in the world.

Back in Winterset, the original tree continued to flourish in a state that was second only to Michigan in apple production. In 1940, on Armistice Day, a ferocious ice storm leveled Iowa’s orchards, a blast from which Iowa’s apple industry would never fully recover. With orchards being expensive to replant and war on the horizon, most orchards were turned into corn and soybean fields. Hiatt’s Hawkeye was split in two during the storm, and newspapers and radio commentators across the state lamented the demise of the historic tree. As Hiatt had noted all those years ago, though, this little tree “must grow.” The following spring it sent up a new sprout, phoenix-like, right from the middle of the split and thrives to this day not far from the historic covered bridges in Madison County. It has a monument to it, a fence and a private horticulturist to protect it, as well as a festival in its honor in Donnellson, Iowa.

Today, the fruit that bears the Delicious name bears little resemblance to that original Hawkeye. The yellow streaks are gone, replaced by a bright red shine. They are bred for shelf life, durability, and crunch but have lost their original flavor. How ironic that it now resembles the very same attributes of the Ben Davis that led Stark to seek a replacement.

Through the efforts of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, cuttings from the original tree have been propagated. At Wilson’s Orchard in Iowa City, owner “Chug” Wilson’s Hawkeye trees have been bearing fruit since 2002, and visitors can pick those apples along with many dozens of other varieties at Wilson’s every fall. One can even enjoy a piping hot apple turnover while strolling through the scenic orchard or enjoy a guided tour on a wagon towed by Chug himself in his big-brimmed hat.

Strolling amidst the well-tended rows of apples, you can feel almost instantly at peace. There is no traffic noise, no blaring advertisements, no background static — only the occasional tickling buzz of a honeybee flying by to see who is appreciating her work. In mid- to late October, the trees are usually heavy-laden with yellow, blush, red, and gold. Chug Wilson called the 2006 crop “a limb-buster,” which was a welcome relief after 2005’s disastrous late-spring freeze, which wiped out the blooms on Wilson’s trees and left them with a harvest of zero. In 2007, the blossoms froze again.

“We had to import apples from Wisconsin [to sell in the orchard store],” Chug told me during that visit. “Never had to do that before.”

Like all farming, growing apples is a very challenging undertaking, subject to the whims of weather, the market, insects, environment, and urban sprawl. Joyce and Chug Wilson know these challenges all too well and have had plenty of offers from land developers to plow their trees under in favor of zero-lots or split-level ranches. They’ve been tempted but have never relinquished the land. It’s far too valuable to them as it is, which you can see when you catch the glint in Chug’s eye when he so much as talks about his apples or when you see Joyce pull her magnificent apple turnovers from the oven in the orchard store.

The idea behind their effort to preserve and revitalize the original Hawkeye apple is not only to acknowledge the important contribution that it made to the apple industry, but also to insure that a particular flavor — one of 140 varieties on Wilson’s 80 acres — is not lost forever.

Apple-Pecan Stuffing

The original Hawkeye apple held up to cooking better than its modern-day descendant, but if you cannot get Hawkeyes in your area, many other heirloom apples work well. Visit your local orchard. This stuffing is delicious on its own or can be stuffed into a pork chop topped with caramelized onions for a great seasonal entrée.

Melt the butter in a large sauté pan over medium high heat. Sauté the apples, pecans, onion, and celery in the sauté pan until just tender. Add the sage, salt, and pepper. Add the bread and mix thoroughly. Add the stock a little at a time until it is absorbed and the stuffing reaches the desired consistency (all a matter of taste, really; you may need more or less stock).

Cool to use as an actual stuffing, or to serve as a side dish, put in a shallow buttered casserole dish and bake about half an hour at 350 degrees F until crisp and crusty on top.

Makes enough to stuff a 12-15 pound turkey or serve 6-8 as a side dish.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-delicious-apple/feed/1hawkeye-apple_friese_h528.jpgTry skipping the Pringleshttp://grist.org/article/salt-savvy/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/salt-savvy/#commentsThu, 16 Oct 2008 06:54:55 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26218]]>Looking for political information on CNN.com, a headline caught my eye: “How to be sodium savvy.” Since I recently developed some concerns in that area I clicked the link. The story was written by a chef named David Hagedorn for Cooking Light Magazine, a part of the CNN/Time/Warner empire.

What I found at the outset was some fairly basic but useful information about why too much salt is bad, how much salt is acceptable, and that the less salt we consume the less we crave. It then told me that most of the salt Americans consume is from processed food (chips, hot dogs, canned soup, etc.).

Their solution? More processed food:

The first step to keep sodium under control is to make smart choices at the grocery store. Choose sodium-free, low-sodium, or no-salt-added convenience foods.

Now the article does make a passing reference to cooking "food at home as often as possible, using fresh fruits and vegetables, grains, low-fat dairy products, fresh meat, poultry, and fish," but then it goes on for several paragraphs about how to find processed foods with less salt.

I propose a simpler solution. Stop eating processed foods. Marcella Hazan said it best: “Saying you have no time to cook is like saying you have no time to bathe.”

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/salt-savvy/feed/0How to turn black walnuts into a delicious dishhttp://grist.org/article/squirrels-loss-our-gain/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/squirrels-loss-our-gain/#commentsFri, 03 Oct 2008 06:36:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/squirrels-loss-our-gain/]]>When I was growing up in central Ohio, school began right after Labor Day. This was advantageous compared to today’s August start, and not just because of the longer summer break. The extra time also allowed the black walnuts to ripen just in time to give us something to hurl at each other as we walked to school that first morning.

Front-yard bounty.

They littered the ground all through the streets on my route to elementary school. It was customary to announce your approach behind fellow students by pelting them with the large green orbs. The nuts seemed to have been created especially to be launched by nine-year-old boys. Two inches across, perfectly round, and with a slightly rough texture that we imagined made it possible to throw curveballs with them. The ripest ones were best because, if they could be made to explode on impact, they left an indelible stain and a smell that followed the target around school all day. I have been both victim and perpetrator numerous times.

Today I use the sweetmeats for far more peaceful purposes such as cakes, breads, and salads, though when no one is looking I occasionally test my aim out on the flood plain behind my house. Still haven’t mastered that curveball.

If you are fortunate enough to have one or two of these magnificent trees in your neighborhood, this is the time of year when you want to be trying to beat the squirrels to the walnuts. Of course, they have the advantage of being able to climb up into the trees and out onto the smallest branches pursuing their winter stashes, but we have the benefit of opposable thumbs and buckets to carry many more at once. So it’s a fair fight.

Before you gather too many, break a couple open with a hammer to make sure the kernels are full (those are the parts we eat, but don’t eat them yet). Crops from even the best trees are unpredictable, and sometimes the kernels fail to fill. Trees that supplied bushels one year may yield only a few good nuts the next, so best to check before you go through all the effort.

The best nuts are picked from the trees, but most people wait for them to fall to the ground — it’s just easier that way. Choose only ripe nuts, which can be identified when their color changes from bright green to a yellowish shade, and the husk can be dented with your thumb.

A few pointers about husking them: Wear gloves and an apron, and do it outside. Some people find the pungent smell objectionable, though I kind of like it despite the aforementioned childhood trauma. The staining reputation of the walnut juice, though, is legendary and well deserved.

Are you nuts? Black walnuts ripen.

Remove the hulls with a hammer or by stomping underfoot (don’t use the running-over-with-a-car method you may have heard of) and wash the nuts thoroughly with a garden hose. Lay them out to dry on old window screens in a cool, dry, well-ventilated place (I use my garage). They will be ready in about two or three weeks, and you can tell they are well cured by cracking one or two, and checking the kernels snap crisply.

As for storage, the University of Minnesota Extension Office advises, “After curing, store unshelled nuts in a well-ventilated area at 60 degrees F or less. Cloth bags or wire baskets allow adequate air circulation and discourage development of mold. Try to keep the relative humidity fairly high, ideally about 70 percent. Nut shells will crack and the kernels spoil if nuts are stored in too dry an area.” Really, though, just put them in your hall closet.

The walnuts I didn’t throw at my friends 30-odd years ago (some might say 30 very odd years) always ended up on our holiday table, in a plastic bowl fashioned to look like a slice of a walnut log, and my father would crack the shells and fish out the meats for the kids. I can still taste them.

In a food processor, pulse the walnuts until they are very finely ground, but not quite a paste. Add parsley and shiitakes and pulse 6 or 7 times until shiitakes are minced. Very important to stop here — as mushrooms lose water, the mixture will begin to bind. Add ginger and drizzle in tamari while pulsing 2 or 3 more times.

Remove mixture and form into a patty, served with condiments and toast.

*Tamari is a form of soy sauce, originally a byproduct of making miso. It is readily available at any Asian market, and now even many mainstream grocery stores.

**Home pickling is fairly easy, but if you must substitute with prepared ones, choose interesting flavors from a purveyor you trust.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/squirrels-loss-our-gain/feed/0black-walnut-wiki_v240.jpgWhen the basil plants get out of control, reach for the mortar and pestlehttp://grist.org/article/the-pesto-chronicles/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
http://grist.org/article/the-pesto-chronicles/#commentsFri, 19 Sep 2008 06:02:43 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/the-pesto-chronicles/]]>

Mortarin’ pesto.

September in Iowa always brings the same delicious dilemma — what to do with all that basil.

Few herbs are as surrounded by mythology and folklore as basil. Its origins are debated, but most seem to think it came from India. There, the plant offered innumerable culinary uses: A devout Hindu has a leaf of basil placed on his breast when he dies, as a passport to paradise. Basil figures in Christian tradition as well. It was the herb Salome used to cover the smell of decay from John the Baptist’s head. Then there’s Haitian Voodoo practice, where the herb is a powerful protector; and Romanian courting rites, where a man is engaged when he accepts a sprig of basil from a woman.

All this information is of little use, though, when faced with bushels of the stuff that we pull out of our gardens the afternoon before autumn’s first expected frost. What to do when faced with more of the green leaves than you could ever consume before it loses freshness? Consider putting some up for the winter.

You can blanch and freeze the bounty with a quick dip in boiling, salted water followed by an instantaneous plunge into ice water (then drain, pat dry, and freeze in Ziplocs). But that practice only postpones the inevitable pesto, and pesto tastes best when made with fresh leaves. Making a voluptuous pesto when the leaves are fresh accomplishes the same task as blanching: It reduces the volume of the basil so it can fit in the freezer. But it also leaves you with a delicious, ready-made sauce for the cold months ahead.

Putting up abundant harvests is a great way to bring family and friends together around the rituals of food. It can take time and several hands to pick over a large amount of basil, separating the leaves from the stems. Don’t throw away those stems, by the way — they can be used to flavor an oil or vinegar, or trussed to your next roast.

Paste You Can Taste

A word about authenticity: The word “pesto” simply means “paste,” and refers not necessarily to the basil and garlic concoction we all know and love, but to the method used to make it correctly — with a mortar and pestle. (Preferably, use a marble mortar and a wooden pestle.) Why not use the food processor when making pesto? Well, a good mortar and pestle will tear the leaves gently, releasing the flavors. A food processor cuts the leaves, blocking the veins from releasing flavor. It also produces heat, which causes the aromatic oils to oxidize, altering the flavor.

One can make a pesto out of just about any combination of herbs and oils imaginable. The earliest record of something we would recognize as pesto comes from Virgil and involved parsley rather than basil. The stuff everyone thinks of when they think of pesto is Pesto alla Genovese, from the Ligurian port of Genoa. This is best made with Genoa basil (the kind with the small round leaves), extra virgin olive oil, toasted pine nuts, and a combination of Pecorino and Parmigiano Reggiano cheeses.

Make it in individual batches, then combine if you like. It’s best fresh but freezes well. Freeze it in ice cube trays, and then turn the cubes into a Ziploc and return to the freezer for convenient use later.

Classic Pesto alla Genovese

Once you have mastered this genuine recipe, feel free to experiment with other ingredients to discover interesting new flavors.

Put the garlic, basil leaves, salt (which helps to preserve the green of the leaves), and pine nuts into the mortar.

Applying pressure, slowly mix ingredients with the pestle. Continue, adding the mixed cheeses a little at a time.When the mixture is smooth and creamy, add olive oil to taste (to the texture you prefer) and stir to incorporate.

To dress pasta, always dilute the pesto with a little of the cooking water from the pasta.

Posted in Food, Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/the-pesto-chronicles/feed/0Makings for basil pestoA few thoughts on an amazing event — and a recipe for a delectably slow-cooked pasta saucehttp://grist.org/article/digesting-slow-food-nation/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_kurtmichaelfriese
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Say cheese: a sample of Slow Food Nation’s Taste Pavilion.

Photo: Russ Walker

It’s going to take me more than just a few days to fully understand the effects and implications of the first Slow Food Nation, held in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend. The brain power on display was impressive enough: Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Winona LaDuke, Carlo Petrini, Raj Patel, Eric Schlosser, and other luminaries took center stage at panels. Add to that the myriad of other events and mind-blowing food, and you get a truly unforgettable event for the thousands who attended.

Despite the multitude of free activities at Slow Food Nation, I heard in the weeks leading up to it that it was all too expensive and was further evidence of food snobs run amok. Yet during the event, the chief complaints I heard were that it was too crowded and that the events that did cost money were all sold out. So while accurate numbers on attendance are still being calculated, it was easy to see that attendance exceeded expectations, and that those who appreciated its worth outnumbered those who did not.

As to the elitism charge, while there are those who will not be convinced otherwise regardless of what Slow Food says or does, it simply does not hold up upon close examination of Slow Food’s work as an organization on the whole. Does it contain members who are snobs or who occasionally act snobby? With 17,000 members before this event and predictions by some that that number may double as a result of it, yes, there is no doubt that in a sampling that large you will find some — perhaps quite a few — “elitists.” But to dismiss the organization’s important work, from networking rural farmers in Africa to helping revive milpas in Mexico, simply because much of what Slow Food does is academic or expensive is myopic.

Slow Food does not do everything right and will never please everyone, nor is it any form of panacea, nor does it claim to be. It can and has made lives better for thousands of people not just in the U.S. and Italy (where it was founded) but from Bolivia to the Ivory Coast to India by supporting farmers and aiding to reinvigorate local food traditions. Here in the U.S. it raised thousands of dollars to help the farmers and fishers affected by Katrina, then raised thousands more for Midwest flood relief. Already Slow Food USA has turned its attention once more to the Gulf in the wake of Hurricane Gustav.

The event itself was a joy to behold. At one of the free events, called the Soapbox and held adjacent to the Victory Garden in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, speakers and performers offered a huge range of ideas, from the political to the poetic (sometimes both), through speeches and dance, drumming and prayer. Especially moving was a performance by peach farmer David Masumoto and his daughter Nikiko of a poem about a hailstorm that wiped out an entire harvest accompanied by the traditional Teiko Japanese drum. Some in the audience wept as they heard the thunder and felt the hail rip the flesh of the peaches.

In the end many people came just for the food, and it was indeed excellent food, from the Indian naan to the Native American Manoomin rice cakes to Iowa prosciutto to abalone to tamales to mufaleta. But they came away with a message, one summarized in the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, which urges the government to adopt “twelve principles [that] should frame food and agriculture policy, to ensure that it will contribute to the health and wealth of the nation and the world.” I strongly encourage you to read it and decide if you want to endorse it.

Amid the divine madness of the event, I didn’t have a chance to put together a recipe. But my colleague Bruce Cole, editor of Edible San Francisco, graciously granted me permission to reprint the following delectable recipe for tomato pesto. It originally appeared in the August/September 2008 issue of Edible San Francisco.

Tomato Pesto

Recipe by Rachel Cole

Life in the slow lane.

Photo: Bruce Cole / Edible San Francisco

According to Rachel Cole, the world of Italian pesto extends beyond that addictive green sauce featuring basil. The word pesto, she writes, originates in the verb “to pound,” and pesto is a “family of sauces that includes any paste made from pounding together ingredients in a mortar and pestle to meld the separate components and flavors.” This one highlights (and concentrates) the flavor of tomatoes, now at the height of harvest over much of the country.

Position oven racks on the upper and lower thirds of the oven and preheat to 225 degrees. Line two large rimmed sheet pans with parchment paper rubbed with olive oil, or with non-stick silicone mats.

Slice tomatoes lengthwise and cut a V around stem to remove. In a large mixing bowl, combine tomatoes, olive oil, salt, pepper, and three of the garlic cloves. Toss gently together to coat. Arrange tomatoes, cut side up, and the oiled garlic in one layer on each sheet pan, spaced slightly apart. Set aside any extra juice or oil left in the mixing bowl.

Place sheet pans in the oven and roast for one hour, then reverse the pans and rotate each 180 degrees. Repeat every hour for at least four hours and up to six. Tomatoes are ready when they have reduced in size by at least half and have begun to caramelize. Allow to cool for 10 minutes. (Do your best to resist eating them all at this stage!)

In a food processor, combine tomatoes, roasted and raw garlic, reserved juices and oil, and pine nuts; process for 30 seconds. Add Parmesan and pulse until combined but still chunky. If making pesto in advance, transfer to a bowl and cover until ready to serve.

Any extra pesto can be refrigerated up to a week; if freezing, wait to add the raw garlic and Parmesan until thawed and ready to eat.

(Makes about 4 cups — way more than enough to sauce a 1-pound package of dried pasta such as spaghetti. To sauce pasta, place about a cup of pesto in a large bowl and dump the cooked, drained pasta over it. Toss and taste. If needed, spoon in more sauce gradually, tossing gently and tasting after each addition, until you reach the desired level of flavor intensity.)

For a tomato-loving gardener, what’s the only thing more frightening than a failed crop? Try an overabundant one. You become terrified that any of these jewels will go to waste. The specter of fruit flies congregating on the compost heap brings regret of over-ambitious spring garden planning. Even in my restaurant garden, which has the advantage of a commercial outlet, the burden of preserving it all can be heavy.

Well, take heart, gentle reaper: There is plenty that can be done with all that red, green, and gold bounty. This year is shaping up to be a bumper-buster at Devotay Gardens, so I thought I’d share what we’re going to be doing and how you can do it at home.

Yes, You Can

After we’ve sold all we can fresh, it’s time for the “puttin’ up.” There are three main ways to preserve tomatoes, each requiring varying levels of time, expertise, and equipment.

Can you dig it?

We have plenty of help at the restaurant, but for the home cook, the most enjoyable way to go about any or all of these methods is to create your own kitchen crew by inviting a few of your fellow gardeners over for a Saturday afternoon of canning, freezing, and drying. If everybody brings their own excess and then works together on all the preparation, the time goes much faster and more pleasurably. In addition, you will have included the most important ingredient: love.

Well, there is one other thing that might be a little more important to the finished product: sanitation. Everything must be scrupulously clean and sterile. Also, accomplishing the correct acid balance will help protect the tomatoes’ flavor as well as preserving them. Use 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid per quart of canned tomatoes. Always follow the instructions that come with your canning equipment, or turn to the old standby, The Joy of Cooking, for information on how to can safely. Do it right: Nothing ruins a February summer-in-a-can pasta dinner like botulism.

Cut and Dried

Another great way to preserve tomatoes is to dry them. Sun-dried tomatoes are a staple in my kitchens, both at home and at the restaurant. While they do take a lot of time, they require very little active participation. All you need is a few pieces of equipment and a safe, sunny spot away from critters like dogs or coons.

Most people choose Roma tomatoes for drying, but any tomato will do. Core the tomatoes using a tomato shark, a handy gadget that is like a scoop with teeth, available at any kitchen store. Split the tomatoes in half lengthwise, gently squeeze out the seeds and water, and lay the tomatoes on a framed screen. An old window screen will do, as long as it is clean. Lightly salt the tomatoes, and then add some chopped fresh herb like rosemary, oregano or basil, and sugar if desired. Cover with cheesecloth or another screen, being careful that the top one does not come into contact with the tomatoes. Set them out in a sunny but protected spot; often a deck or a rooftop works well. They may take anywhere from 4 days to 2 weeks, but they are worth it. Remember to bring them inside each night so that the dew does not spoil them.

Vine and dandy.

OK, looking for the shortcut? Tomatoes can be dried in your oven overnight on the lowest setting or just with the pilot light burning. Core and cut them as before and lay them on a parchment-covered sheet pan. Add salt and herbs and place in the oven on very low overnight. These dried tomatoes do not have quite the same character as their more traditional sun-dried siblings, but they are quite good nonetheless.

Another great way to use a multitude of tomatoes is to make and freeze a big batch of traditional tomato sauce. To begin, you must peel all your tomatoes. This is done by coring them with the aforementioned “shark,” then plunging them, a few at a time, into boiling salted water for 30 to 45 seconds. Remove them immediately and “shock” them by immediately plunging them into ice water until they are cold enough to handle. Repeat this with all the tomatoes. The skin will loosen and be easy to remove with your hands or a paring knife. Crush these skinned tomatoes into a bowl by squeezing them with your hands. This whole process can be messy, but it is fun if you get a group of friends working together.

Sauté onions, garlic, thyme, and carrot in olive oil over medium heat in a large saucepot until tender, being careful not to let the mixture brown. Add the tomatoes and stir, bring to a simmer, and stir frequently over medium-low heat for at least an hour, or until the consistency is like a loose oatmeal. Cool completely, then freeze in well-labeled Ziploc bags. Note the lack of salt: You don’t want to salt it until you are ready to use it. The salt may taste great at that moment, but once you thaw, heat, and reduce this sauce to use in your favorite recipe, it would become too salty.

If after all this, you still have tomatoes left, bring them to me. I can never get enough.